ebook - Enterprise 2.0 - VOSS

24 Dion Hinchcliffe
Figure 4
To frame this up, as I like stories let us talk about what is actually happening here.
The wake up call came for us in 2005 with stories like KatrinaList (Fig. 4). This was
the big hurricane that came through New Orleans. In the immediate aftermath of that
disaster people were fleeing the area, they were going to Texas and Baton Rouge.
But even back then people were using their own personal channels on the Web and
within the first few hours people began to notice in things like on sites looked blog
traffic that survivors were turning up and they were going to the blogs and they were
typing in: I am okay, I survived and here is one located. That was incredibly valuable
information. It was not just a hundred of reports, not just thousands but tens of
thousands reported on the internet from what was happening. Within a few days
50.000 reports, within a week they had over 100.000 and eventually a quarter of a
million survivor reports. These came not from any pre-planned activity, nobody at
the top was driving us. It was something that spontaneously happened. This shows
that we have a failure of imagination in what we think is possible because in a
traditional IT view of thus a government would have created a very expensive
central web side and they would have gone in the air and would have said: please, go
and report that you are okay and where you are located. They didn’t even do that. But
what happened what we don’t believe all need to realise that these sorts of things are
happening in some of the organisations already today and could happen in a lot of
more if we enabled the conditions for these things to happen.