Global risks

The report ‘Global Risks 2013’ of the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, is impressive. You can find it here http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2013/

It provides an overview of risks as they are seen based on a yearly repeated survey of of over 1000 experts from industry, government and academia. Severe income disparities and chronic fiscal imbalance are considered the most prevalent global risks, next to (consequences of) greenhouse gas emissions e.g. for natural disasters.

The topic of ‘digital wildfires’ is scrutinized, including includes various risks related to the hyperconnectivity of society nowadays, such as massive digital misinformation and cyber attacks. For example, fake tweets have moved markets and influenced elections. This calls for an responsibility and a healthy skepticism of social media users. Obviously social media bring advantages as well as challenges.

Several of our research projects, and the researchers and students involved, aim at investigating and enhancing resilience, see www.crisiscommunication.com. Resilience can be seen on the level of individuals, groups and societies. It relates to the potential to bounce back and recover from crises. Resilience is considered especially needed where risks are non-predictable.

An important resource for resilience is human capital, communities that are able to self-organize. Flexibility and connections between institutions and with public groups, creativity and innovation help create safety as a co-production of social networks and governmental organizations. Communication can contribute to resilience by facilitating such cooperation. This includes sharing of information, e.g. by crowdsourcing. Monitoring social media is important, but what then? We should get also a clearer picture of communication strategies that facilitate this co-production and thus support resilience in various situations. There is a lot to be investigated and developed!

Old stereotypes die hard

Reaction to column by Pekka Mervola, newspaper Keski-Suomalainen, about too many and unnecessary communication officers that just polish organizational images (Turhaa töhinää viestinnässä)

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It must be disappointing that the number of journalists is under pressure, while the number of communication experts within organizations is rising (and where I come from faster than yet here).
But that is no reason to present such stereotypes of a profession that already 10 years ago was different than depicted by Pekka Mervola, as I also know of own practice.

I do not doubt that disappointing tales about professionals can still be found. But then, almost every day when I watch the work of journalists I am sometimes positively surprised but often disappointed that one isn’t much more critical and that there is so little investigative journalism.

He is welcome at our team where we teach students that an image is not something polished the way the organization wants it to be, but an image is owned by publics and valuable information on the organization’s legitimacy. Reputation needs to be earned and can’t be polished.

It must also be irritating to Pekka Mervola that communication experts do not spend all their time facilitating journalist reporting, actually the percentage of time is decreasing. Nowadays we have many other tasks.  Communication is an interface/bridging function that monitors consumer trends and issues relevant for the organization, and helps it to function better in cooperation with customers and other stakeholders. We also support change management.

Communication experts of organizations and journalists can both be considered attention workers, and can also both contribute to involving publics in decision making. Yes, we both have great ideals! Of course, both may also have opportunistic reasons and this may explain why you so cheaply utter these old-fashioned stereotypes, because you think either your palls may like it or it will deliver you more readers.

Actually, Pekka, we have much more in common and that may be a frightening thought to you…

Of course, I realize that it will be so easy to do away with my reaction, as it isn’t translated in Finnish, and yet that would be using even more stereotypes, now against foreigners. Of course, our communication staff department will be disappointed that I didn’t ask for translation. But maybe you have a heart and will visit us for an exchange of opinions and we can tell more about our different and modern views on communicative organizations. You are warmly invited.   ;-)

You may have to read this twice to appreciate the humour between the lines.
Prof. Marita Vos, University of Jyväskylä

Co-producing safety requires a changed culture in public administration

Mid December I was invited as a keynote speaker in an interesting Danish conference in Copenhagen. Much of the content of the day was devoted to the attacks in 2011 in Oslo and Utoya Norway (see earlier blog) and how we can improve preparedness for such sad events, but also other topics popped up of which some had also been mentioned by participants of the conference end of August in Davos Switzerland (also see an earlier blog). I would like to share these topics with you. One is the organizational culture in response organizations that makes it difficult to improvise in crisis times, and –related to this– the cooperation needed between response organisations and with citizen groups or communities.

          We plan for uncertain situations and exercise preparedness in the face of the unknown. If we plan in a too detailed way and develop too precise procedures, we will not be flexible enough to react to new and evolving situations. When we investigate scenarios we should keep in mind that these are just examples or prototypes of what could happen and that reality may be very different. Therefore, exercises should not focus on properly using procedures but rather on flexible problemsolving, in a less detailed but more effective way.

          In a crisis per definition structures collapse and hierarchies may not function in chaotic situations. However, many authorities have a culture of command and control. This makes it difficult to improvise in crisis times and flexibly answer to changing situations. A cooperative and flexible leadership style is also needed. This helps bridge cultural differences among different organizations in the response network, by bringing together experiences to find new solutions. The coalitions that need to be build in crisis times consist of organisations and public groups that may differ for each crisis situation.

          In developing countries community approaches in disaster management have been promoted in for several decades. Authorities and NGOs active in relief activities are expected to do so in contact with local civil groups. UN sources mention that this close cooperation still requires a shift in the culture of public administration. But it seems that for this, by now, western countries can learn from experiences in developing countries. Somehow Western European publics seem to delegate crisis preparedness to authorities, as indeed there are many specialist crisis response organizations. However, crisis response depends on a co-production with citizens and strong ties between expert organizations and citizen groups are an important resource. An example of such an inspiring philosophy can be found on the website of the American organization FEMA.

Some sources:
- Dynes, R.R. (1994), Community emergency planning: False assumptions and inappropriate analogies. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, 12(2), 141-158.
- Maskrey A. (2011), Revisiting Community-Based Disaster Risk Management. Environmental Hazards, 10(1), 42-52. (also see UNISDR)
- FEMA (2011), A whole community approach to emergency management: Principles, themes, and pathways for action. New York: Federal Emergency Management Agency. http://www.fema.gov/library/viewRecord.do?id=4941

Is funding a threat for critical science? Scientists spend more time applying for funding and reviewing applications while success rates decrease...

Not long ago we had a research review in which current challenges of science were also discussed. One of these was the necessity to gather funding. On the one hand, funding was seen as the only way to increase (or continue with) the number of researchers currently engaged. On the other hand, funding was also considered to be a threat for critical science. Or is the way in which the funding system is currently used the problem with its ever rising numbers of applications for decreasing budgets?

        Funding is often associated with research assignments with a narrow focus and short term perspective, paid by organizations that have related interests which may hinder critical research and not help much to build long-term expertise. Funding by EU or national academies offers more possibilities to build expertise over a number of years, investigate critically and contribute to problem solving in society. In that way funding and critical science can go together.

        However, currently almost all of the research needs competing for funding. The university budget includes less and less budget for research, so it has to be applied for. This development has been going on for some decades and resulted in a loss of academic freedom. Many researchers feel pressured by the competitive climate to get funding, all the rankings and counting publications in ranked journals. They cannot spend research time as they see fit. Society wants scientists to be accountable for how research budget is spent and this has led to a funding system that also has its problems. One problem is that there are few open calls and not all topics are ‘popular’ and gain attention this way.

        Another growing problem is that nowadays so many proposals are send in that the time invested in writing and reviewing the proposals grows out of proportion, while the chances of gaining funding have decreased, for example, to just 10 per cent. Thus, more time is invested in writing and reviewing proposals, which leaves less time available for research. Many proposals will not be implemented and just add to the bureaucracy. National academies should not give greater quota to universities that send in more proposals, and faculties could better focus on good applications, so success rate rather than high numbers of proposals.

Interesting views at the Davos conference

End of August we had the pleasure to visit the International Disaster and Risk Conference high up in the mountains of Davos, Switzerland. There were breathtaking views after taking the cable-lift, but just as interesting views in the contents shown at the conference.

There was much attention for prepardeness for disasters in developing countries and other crises all around the globe. I heard interesting presentations on preparedness for bush fires in Australia and many speakers stressed the importance of social media in public discourse on risks and crises.

Trends were the emphasis on climate change and its consequences, but also attention given to improving resilience in big cities all around the world. Community approaches were common when talking about developing countries, and also mentioned in the USA and Australia, while it seems that in Europe rescue services by authorities are professional but less linked with citizen response. Communication can strengthen this. Furthermore, the role of information technology was stressed, and cooperation in multi-stakeholder networks.

Our workshop about the international FP7 project Public Empowerment Policies for Crisis Managament got interested listeners and the flyers referring to the project may increase traffic on the project website www.crisiscommunication.fi. We will be back in Davos to present more research results in 2014.

Social Media & Crises (2)

Arranging environmental monitoring requires enough manpower trained for such communication tasks. In the latest e-newsletter of the Dutch National Crisis Centre a one-day national event was mentioned during which, among others, a team of 8 media analysts was active. In the case of a breaking crisis more media analysts would have been added, next to other crisis communication experts. Now two of them focused on monitoring of approximately 4000 tweets that day. Analysing social media discourse is still time consuming but tools like Seesmic are helpful and such tools are continuously further developed. At this stage the aim is to detect information, to get an early warning of possible problems or misperceptions.

When a crisis hits, people look for information on Internet. Not many people know how to find the suitable authority webpage for the current disaster. Usually they use a search engine and type the name of the crisis. Then they first get a list of links to news sites and a diversity of other mostly non-confirmed sources. In many cases the official websites of authorities involved may not even be mentioned in the top of the search results, and this is especially lacking in the later phases of a crisis. So maybe there is a good team available providing much needed information, but their website is not found by the search engines.

For this there are several solutions. First, authorities may get higher on the list of search results by using Google Adwords. Facilitating that people connect with official crisis communication sources is not new, as for example many phones have pre-arranged the crisis notification number 112, and television channels can be interrupted for crisis messages according to regulations in many countries.

Second, one can also invite traffic to the website by own interventions in the social media, using a multi-channel approach. Tweets are an efficient way to update authority information on the crisis situation, and different public organizations involved can coordinate content and use the same hashtag. Public organizations can include links to their website in their tweets and postings on social networking sites like Facebook.

Preparedness campaigns can refer to the crisis and preparedness website and thus increase familiarity with it. Some countries have a portal leading to all kinds of governmental information and may add a clearly visible link to the website that offers information on a current crisis. This website could next to instructions and background information also include a section in which own tweets and posts are brought together on the current crisis. Websites that facilitate 112 notifications sometimes also show those notifications already given or confirmed, and may visualize this using crowd mapping. Fast procedures and an integral approach with many ways to Rome are advised.

Social media use in crises communication

Privately I’m only moderately enthusiastic about social media, but when it comes to crisis communication I must admit there are great opportunities. It is much faster and easier to update information for publics using a Twitter account than traditional media. But more importantly, there are applications people can directly contribute information to.

Most impressive are Ushadid and Crowdmap developed in Africa that facilitate reports of individual citizens and visualize them on a map. But also Google Person Finder should be mentioned, a bulletin board using open software that can be integrated in any website, and the Red Cross Family Links Webpage. These are means for crowdsourcing.

For organizations crisis communication has not become easier, as expectations are rising and they will have to use multiple channels to address a diversity of publics. Integrated communication is needed, utilizing traditional and social media, next to working with communities and intermediaries. Much preparation is needed to have hidden sites ready for various scenarios, that when they are needed can be launched fast via social media spreading the link to these websites or other open sites with information on preparedness, such as www. ready.gov.

Organizations can cooperate during an emergency, using the same hashtag or even twitter account to update information. People can be asked as eye-witnesses to upload damage pictures on Flickr, or to help clean up the neighbourhood after an incident as has happened in London after the riots. Spontaneous actions vary from linking the Facebook page on a crisis situation to one’s own, to participation in donation contests in Twitter.

Of course, there are also challenges. Monitoring what’s happening during crises in the social media is one of these challenges. Feed provided from social networks and Twitter has to be analysed, e.g. using dashboards like Seesmic and Addict-O-matic, or Europe Media monitor. There is still a lot to learn and investigate!