A Cell Phone Powered Digital Neighborhood Watch Plan

On the horizon there is a cell phone enabled neighborhood watch that’s coming for the digital age and utilization of the power that comes behind social networking and mobile social networking is what has been planned. Some in the United States have made the suggestion of creation of a CRG –Community Response Grid- in concurrence with other emergency services.

Something like this would allow citizens to do things like leaving texts, videos or photos on the sites of the emergencies, natural disasters or terror attack.

A pilot for this could actually start fairly soon and be based out of the University of Maryland and 40k staff and students. The initiative of having nationwide 911.gov sites has been proposed by the university for a while now.

The functionality of our nation’s 911 system if very good when it comes to something like, a health emergency, a traffic accident, small fire and so on. The incidents that occur and would have numbers of people on a mass scale, however, the ability to handle that capacity isn’t there.

With the internet revolution and mobile internet revolution and evolution the maturity level of it at this point as well as the tremendous success that social networking sites are having suggests that there is an excellent opportunity to take that and make something more out of it for both emergency response and recovery in the time of a greater disaster.

Community Driven

The premise of the proposal is to have the community driven sites to be run by volunteers that have been trained and have them work with the 6,100 911 services throughout the United States.

These “citizen reporters” would be responsible for reporting to a more centralized authority that would then be responsible for the coordination of the emergency response and allocation of the scarce resources of our police, medical and fire. This is something that will give neighbors and others within communities throughout the country to have more power in helping to protect and support themselves and others.

Information garnered would be added to the regular updates from the other sources like:

• Hospitals
• Emergency crews
• Surveillance cameras
• Sensors from Homeland Security
• More

This website would be a resource of information and a place for others to contribute material. There are quite a few hurdles to overcome but this is something that could feasibly be done in 3-5 years time. The internet is both strong and dependable enough to be that conduit for information in any major disaster.

Justifiable Concerns

The fact is that any type of communications medium can be vulnerable, especially when it comes to specific types of devastation like a disaster or a terrorist attack. These concerns are both legitimate and justifiable ones.

The internet is something that is designed to have resilience built in and if the proposal is something that would go forward it’d likely strengthen the requirements for having extremely reliable systems and these are very much available.

Through the encouragement of support from other groups that are already in existence you could keep the community going even when there isn’t anything to report. Things to look at would be:

• Volunteer firemen
• Libraries
• Sports groups
• Others

The one key is to have the CRG be robust enough that it would be able to handle the traffic spikes during the time of a very large scale emergency as the hits would be coming in, in massive numbers. Having peak service problems would be one of the most substantial issues to a community like this.

Pranksters

There are issues that would fall around pranksters giving false information and that information being something that could have potentially fatal consequences. The one way to combat that would be to have everyone pre-register and make sure the system doesn’t allow for any anonymous entry.

You must get people engaged for something like this to work. Learn about it and be a part of it.

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Tags: apps, citizen journalists, mobile internet, Smartphones, texting

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 10:55 am by Bryan Bradshaw and is filed under Cell Phone Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.