It’s fairly widely acknowledged throughout the emergency community that due to the rise in citizen use of technology, emergency services are now rarely the first on the scene of a disaster. Most emergencies are first publicly highlighted on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or another social media platforms as people proximate to the situation take photos and…
Eileen Culleton, the Founder and CEO of the Emergency 2.0 Wiki has been offered a speaking slot at the 5th International Disaster and Risk Conference (#IDRC2014) and is crowdfunding the money she needs to get there. The International Disaster and Risk Conference from IDRC is one of the world’s premier risk management conferences, attracting over 1,000 delegates…
In June Baltimore Police Department hit a milestone on Twitter, reaching 50,000 followers. In celebration of this, they released the following video, reflecting the department’s achievement and thanking the community for helping them make Baltimore’s streets safer. It is an awesome video and I totally support and respect organisations celebrating like this. It’s important for…
I’m currently in Singapore, having just finished running a two-day masterclass for Singaporean public servants on how to use social media in emergency management. It is a very interesting topic and one I don’t think is high enough on the radar in Australia or many other countries, although there’s now plenty of case studies on…
Gavin Tapp has done his magic and so, with the assistance of the ACT Government, I’m happy to present both videos from the Gov 2.0 event I ran in Canberra on the 14th. I’ve embedded both videos in order below with the bios of the speakers. Darren Cutrupi Darren Cutrupi has been the Manager, Media…
Canberra’s free Gov 2.0 lunchtime events continue for the fourth year in 2013, with the first monthly event featuring two great presentations: “R.I.P. to the media release, hello crowd sources” on the use of social media in real-time emergency communications by Darren Cutrupi of the ACT Emergency Services Agency, and “The British Invasion – how…
There’s a lot of the work and lag involved in releasing emergency alerts using old fashioned approaches such as media releases. Even when an agency’s systems are tuned to fast-track emergency approval processes, when the media release gets distributed that may only be the beginning, not the end, of the process. The release need to…
Last week the Department of Human Services changed its policy regarding staff who participated in volunteer activities – unpaid work undertaken on their own time. The Department decided that, in order to protect against potential conflicts of interest, public servants had to report their volunteer activities to their Manager and seek approval to do it….
It’s come to my attention that the BushfireConnect team were unsuccessful in securing a small grant under the National Disaster Resilience Grant Scheme to support their work in providing emergency support during Australia’s bushfire season. I’ve been told that the reason the grant was rejected was that, “as the VIC Emergency Services do not yet have a Social…
This morning, like many Canberra residents, I awoke to the news of the Mitchell fire. Like most in the digital age (who weren’t close enough to hear explosions), I learnt about it by reading news online, and hopped straight on Twitter to find the latest updates. I was very glad (and surprised) to find that…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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