Comments on: Emergency Social Media Needs To Be Tailored To Mobile Phones As Well As Computers

By: Jonas Landgren

Jonas Landgren — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:15:05 +0000

I do believe that John is absolutely right in the observation that mobile devices are becoming more and more critical when designing apps and services for crisis communication. However, I would like to push it a bit longer and make a perhaps even stronger statement.

The only thing we will know for sure in times of large scale emergencies and crisis are that people in formal and informal response organizations will have a mobile phone in their pockets. So the challenge is not to only tailor applications for the mobile devices, but to actually rethink the complete application paradigm and shift the design to applications that truly make full use of the fact that mobile devices has completely unique features that computers still do not have. A mobile device is not a laptop or a small version of a stationary computer. In terms of a mobile phone, it is a consumer electronic product with a different set of design dimensions that crisis management software vendors still have a hard time to make use of. We need new business models, new interaction models, and new infrastructure and development models that fundamentally are different to the old “we are investing in crisis-IT” perspective. Most organizations are not at all interested in IT, but they are desperate for better technology use. I would argue that much can be learn from the design of social media where a completely different is emerging. The mobile device is not small laptop, it is something different and this difference should be explored. In my research group we have young ambitious students that cannot wait to lay their hands of the intellectual goods that is produced in the intersection between formal and informal organizations and crisis response.

By: John Shea

John Shea — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:47:36 +0000

That was one of the key lessons learned Janice Nall expressed at a workshop on Monday. CDC has really taken the lead on mobile communication research (NOAA is very good, as is DC gov’t), but the rest of the public information apparatus needs to catch up with the need to identify appropriate delivery methods for initial and subsequent messages. It really culminates in gov’t having to rethink its audience.

By: Jonathan D. Abolins

Jonathan D. Abolins — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:15:20 +0000

John, thanks for this posting and covering this topic.

If soem readers are wondering what I meant by the various techniques to handle languages that aren’t supported on devices, I’ll give some some examples of “Romanization” of Arabic texts.

For Arabic, there are things such as Arabic Chat Alphabet. Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_Chat_Alphabet

A good presentation on Decoding Arabic Chat: http://www.basistech.com/knowledge-center/Arabic/arabic-chat-linguistics.pdf

The same general concepts can be found for other languages, including Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, etc.

The key thing is finidng out what the non-English readers in your audience are doing with their mobile devices. Otherwise, much effort could be spent in translating info into other languages for mobile device access but it isn’t accessible when it’s most needed. Get people from the non-English reading community involved in the design and testing.