Resilient Nation
How communities respond to systemic breakdown
Social Media
at 3:24pm on Thursday, 25th September 2008
Social media will be one of the big themes of Resilient Nation. As Clay Shirky has pointed out before - technology has become socially interesting. Citizens and communities may still rely on government agencies to help them in a time of crisis, but there is now lots of evidence that they are doing their own things as well - thanks to Web 2.0 stuff. The point is not that this is making agencies irrelevant - rather it is helping communities become increasingly more resilient - through information and creating self help groups - in turn this has opened up a new communication channel for Governments (media thus becomes less influential) and allows agencies to focus on those most in need.
LOGIN to add comments
Comments
Kent CC are developing a concept to support people's ability to be the experts of their own lives, using some of the tools above to enable people to "pick" information on our services (and others) and "mix" (or mash if you prefer) them with the free applications they already use on the web (such as those featured on the "social media landscape" diagram).
This will involve us enabling publicly available information to be re-used & shown in a more meaningful way.
People use these "mashups" depending on what they need at any given time or place. They pick what suits them. They may only want to visit the platform to use a mashup or they may want to create their own. They may also want to use a mashup that someone else created earlier.
And that's where things get really interesting. What you create for yourself can benefit others, whether it's to find out if your landlord is charging you the right rent, whether it's to help fix your neighbourhood or whether it's to find somewhere to stay after a natural disaster.
Will it make them more resilient, or rather will it support their ability to build some sort of collective resilience?