Community led recovery
In the rush to help fire affected communities, we need to remember it's a recovery partnership, complex information management + logistics problem.
We know there are some great online communities forming and offers of help flooding in, but it's the on-ground co-ordination of matching recovery requests with inbound offers that gets messy. Facebook is a great spot for conversational exchange, but lousy as a project tracking system to support community led recovery efforts. Resilience in communities is built by sourcing local, buying local and aligning recovery efforts around local needs.
We've seen community leaders and community hubs leading local advocacy and recovery efforts, spending extraordinary hours of time on trying to manage inbound requests. Getting some structure around those can help in both managing local needs and communicating those needs to recovery agencies that arrive in location to assist.
Whilst we know there are a broad range of efforts underway to manage the tasking load, we also know that spreadsheets+emails won't cut it over time - robust task management tools are needed. Community hubs, community leaders + recovery co-ordinators need effective, simple tools that help see + prioritise recovery needs in their towns, pointing resources to where they're needed most.
We're going to use this page to chronicle some of the collaboration patterns we're seeing in recovery efforts, but frame it as an information management challenge to help sort through some of the risk factors in each approach and come up with a community leaders guide to managing local recovery effort.
Our Ask: If you spot a community or community leader doing it tough and needing guidance, resources or support in their InfoMgt (IM) challenge, tag the post with #AusFireHackIM
We know there are some great online communities forming and offers of help flooding in, but it's the on-ground co-ordination of matching recovery requests with inbound offers that gets messy. Facebook is a great spot for conversational exchange, but lousy as a project tracking system to support community led recovery efforts. Resilience in communities is built by sourcing local, buying local and aligning recovery efforts around local needs.
We've seen community leaders and community hubs leading local advocacy and recovery efforts, spending extraordinary hours of time on trying to manage inbound requests. Getting some structure around those can help in both managing local needs and communicating those needs to recovery agencies that arrive in location to assist.
Whilst we know there are a broad range of efforts underway to manage the tasking load, we also know that spreadsheets+emails won't cut it over time - robust task management tools are needed. Community hubs, community leaders + recovery co-ordinators need effective, simple tools that help see + prioritise recovery needs in their towns, pointing resources to where they're needed most.
We're going to use this page to chronicle some of the collaboration patterns we're seeing in recovery efforts, but frame it as an information management challenge to help sort through some of the risk factors in each approach and come up with a community leaders guide to managing local recovery effort.
Our Ask: If you spot a community or community leader doing it tough and needing guidance, resources or support in their InfoMgt (IM) challenge, tag the post with #AusFireHackIM
Recovery Toolkits
recovers.org
A free online community resource for community based disaster recovery, allows local regions to setup their own placename to create a sensible, memorable URL.
Examples include:
https://bowraville.recovers.org
https://mallacootaau.recovers.org
A free online community resource for community based disaster recovery, allows local regions to setup their own placename to create a sensible, memorable URL.
Examples include:
https://bowraville.recovers.org
https://mallacootaau.recovers.org
Facebook
SelfOrganised Facebook groups have popped up all over the place - some notable ones that are getting on top of how to structure content by using topic tagging include Tradies for Fire Affected Communities
SelfOrganised Facebook groups have popped up all over the place - some notable ones that are getting on top of how to structure content by using topic tagging include Tradies for Fire Affected Communities
'However, the tradeoff is that each new FB group competes for primacy, creating a competitive race for likes as a measure of reach, and posts are subject to the whims of host moderators. We've seen multiple examples of arbitrary removal of posts, or loss of visibility by background FB algorithms - the larger impact is that the very needs of subject locations get dispersed and diffused across so many fronts that it's hard to see what a community and the individuals within it actually need, within one authoritative location. As much as we appreciate the goodwill of generous individuals, it's worth thinking about how you can concentrate hyper-local focus onto the needs of nearby communities, encouraging + making those needs visible for others to be able to respond to.