Google Big Tent, and the Discussion of Digital Disaster Response in Japan

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has just published a series of videos from its recent Big Tent Japan event that took place in Sendai on July 2nd, to discuss technology’s role in disaster response in light of last year’s March 11 earthquake.

I encourage you to check out the videos below, because this is an important discussion. Some of them are a little long, and there may be more to come, so stay tuned to the Big Tent YouTube channel.

1. Big Tent Japan Highlights – 2:29
2. Welcome from Suzuki Kan – 6:12
3. Rachel Whetstone Welcome – 3:18
4. Margareta Wahlstrom Keynote – 31:05
5. Brian McClendon at Big Tent – 13:52
6. Network Resilience in a Crisis – 42:15
7. Citizen Mapping Demos – 15:30
8. Communicating in a disaster – 46:41
9. Making use of Data – 44:31
10. From Web to Real World – 47:47
11. Working with government data – 53:19
12. Emergency Alert Demos – 9:56
13. Managing the crowd – 39:40

A great conversation that could be even greater

Personally speaking, I don’t have any expertise in using technology for disaster response. But as a heavy consumer of news I do know which digital services were most informative to me as a citizen living in Japan (I collected a few here). It would be great to see media organizations in Japan join this Big Tent conversation too. As far as digital news distribution goes, Japan currently does not have a true news website, in my opinion. It’s mostly just printed news copied and pasted to the web. Think about that for a second. That’s a pretty big handicap to overcome when your country is hit with a disaster. So bringing media into this discussion is critically important as well [1].

In addition to folks who worked in the immediate disaster response, it would have also been nice to see this conversation include more of the folks who helped the public understand radiation data in affected areas and around Japan. Volunteers like Marian Steinbach, for example, who quickly crowdsourced radiation data collection on Google Docs from the bousai.ne.jp website, or Shigeru Kobayashi who created Geigermaps.jp which then in turn inspired this Japan Geigermap from Haiyan Zhang [2]. These volunteers, many of them using Google tools, helped deliver information that most text/narrative-based journalists couldn’t convey.