Community Situational Awareness and Resilience through Mobile Applications

Access to social networks via portable devices promises to be especially valuable for public communities. Because smart phones increasingly accompany community members wherever they are, the social network extends into everyday interactions where location-specific, real time interactions are natural and resulting actions can be immediate. Governments and NGOs can leverage the self-organizing, collectively-intelligent community to improve situational awareness and improve the community's resilience. At this time of limited public budgets, static but authoritative data can be combined with dynamic data provided by citizens. This paper reports our experience and challenges in building a mobile app named Yellow Button. We describe the architecture of Yellow Button and our experience in the initial applications to utilities, traffic and transportation.