Institute For The Future

Can Facebook Help in an Emergency?

 

Via NPR comes word of a recently launched contest to identify ways to use Facebook in an emergency. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and hosted at the awesome challenge.gov site, the contest is based on the idea that:

 

 

 

When a disaster strikes the connections someone has to other people can make one of the most significant differences in how well they do during an event and how well they recover after. The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) would like to create a Facebook application that helps individuals be sure that those connections are in place so that they are better prepared for the next catastrophic event....

 

Building community resilience is one of ASPR’s primary missions; knowing who to count on for help during a catastrophic event and establishing strong connections within one’s network are two ways individuals can play an important role in building resilient communities. ASPR challenges you to help improve community resilience by designing a Facebook application that makes it easy for people to create their own emergency support network and provides users with useful tools in preparing for and responding to emergencies.

 

 

 

 

In other words, having strong social connections is incredibly valuable to our health and security. In some sense, the concept of this challenge is noting that social connections--having a few nearby friends and relatives who have responsibility for each other--can be one of the most valuable health and safety resources in the event of an emergency.

 

I think this challenge is a signal of a second shift: Namely, from top-down systems to participatory systems, where many of our most valuable health resources stem from self-organized, smaller scale networks. Speaking with NPR,, Assistant Secretary for HHS Nicole Lurie noted that "In the end it's going to be friends and neighbors who are going to help each other out in an emergency situation." In this sense, one of the big opportunities in public health will be, as Lurie recognizes, finding ways to facilitate, strengthen and connect local networks.