My friend Regina Phelps just posted a fascinating article on how Twitter and Facebook are being used to organize the post-riot cleanup in London. At this writing the page @Riotcleanup has over 87,000 followers exchanging information about the cleanup and trying to match resources to needs. A Facebook page exchanging information on the riot has over 19,000 likes.
There's also a webpage that assists in organizing the cleanup via Twitter - the website shows a map of cleanup locations and corresponding Twitter feeds or allows viewers to add their own cleanup location.
What is extremely impressive is that this is all organized by the community, not the official emergency services. Even more interesting is that these are not the only social media sites for this subject - this is not a case of one or two people leading and others following. Rather, it is a community responding collectively to a crisis. We're seeing similar things happening in Christchurch and in Japan.
Despite years of research to the contrary one of the most persistent myths in emergency planning is that people must be led and are incapable of acting in their own best interests. Social media is finally providing the community with the means to finally put this myth to rest.
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