Crowd sourcing in time of crisis
ABC has been making significant changes to adopt various type of crown sourced information in its reports of recent crises such as Queensland floods and Black Saturday bushfires. Starting in the 2008 brushfires, the network quickly recognised the advantage of social media in timely updating emergency situations. They then utilised various established news accounts across multiple countries, channels and divisions on the major social networks to fill the public in what happen in time of disasters. The result was, needless to say, more comprehensive and instant insight of the provinces.
The social media is, owing to its natures, usually considered unofficial and less creditable source. However, upon acknowledging the vitality of the mass’s communication, ABC has been embracing the social network as one of their main channel, apart from TV, radio and such, especially in disasters’ bulletins in which sometimes timeliness, not reliability is the key. The national broadcaster does not use social media as a supplement to traditional ways of broadcasting but a standalone platform which, alongside the web and on air programs, offers higher broadcast availability and instant feedbacks from the audience. ABC editors think the most effective way to get community responses is to make concise, to the point questions and more importantly, information has to be consistent as well as updated. Although it is indeed a challenge, they managed to maintain a huge number of followers as a very active community.
ABC also experiment new approaches, among them, the most prominent could be the crowd-mapping platform Ushahidi, a software system built to gather information in crisis area from multiple sources: SMS, email, online form and tweet. While this use of social media show a positive result: the site of Toowoomba flood alone served 230,000 visit over 24 days of the incident, ABC apparently had not expected people to not only visit their map because of curiosity but also be engaged as they did. Ushahidi is a potential software which has been increasingly popular, most recently their creators has been working on a computer algorithm that help summarise and verify information to make the platform even more reliable and useful.
