Wildfire Smoke & Health Risk

Communication Workshop

App Development:

Infrastructure & Capabilities

for Effective Community Engagement

Waiting for the perfect solution?

Focus on users

The Who, What, When, Where & Why

Who: Citizens, Agency Decision Makers, etc.

Authoritative sources (different per

geography, scientific vs. celebrity?)

User focused messaging: Making data meaningful and actionable

The Who, What, When, Where & Why

What: Making data meaningful (and actionable)

Questions do people have? Is someone aware of this, who’s in charge, what is being done?

Severity, Urgency, Certainty, Duration, ...

Messaging at the right place at the right time

The Who, What, When, Where & Why

When: Before, During, & After (provide updates and enable people to plan for today and tomorrow...)

Where: Change is best enabled when you reach people through their usual routines

Communicating Risk that Enacts Action & Change

The Who, What, When, Where & Why

Why: Educating people about risks and impacts and why they should take action

Developing apps for engaging communities & risk communication

The How

How will authoritative sources submit data / information?

How can the data be formatted to be easily accessible / understood / used by others?

+ CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) standard message format

+ JSON, XML

How can developers access the data?

+ Free & open data policy

+ Push/Poll Restful API services

+ App Platform Development Platforms (NOAA Big Data CRADA, IBM Bluemix, OSTP PREP)

How can users be part of the solution?

How can we gain info / insight / learn from users?

+ User submitted info (address, age, health conditions, have children, have pets, etc)

+ User verification of observations (is there smoke at your location?)

+ User feedback/comments process

How do we get users to use apps/sites?

Enabling an open infrastructure to encourage dissemination

1) Alerting Authorities

2) Publishing tools - Authorized users

create/approve info/alerts on a platform that

attributes the Alerting Authority as source &

distributes the info to a Hub

3) Hub

Enables Publishers to post info &

Subscribers to receive

Info from Authorities

4) Subscribers / Citizens

receive info/alerts from

Authority(s)

Future Capabilities?

Integrating smoke info based on user context/activity

Citizen Scientist Social Reporting of Smoke Info?

Report & Recover - User generated reporting and clean air shelter locations

Questions?