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      <page pageid="21" ns="0" title="Recovery phase (phase 5)">
        <revisions>
          <rev contentformat="text/x-wiki" contentmodel="wikitext" xml:space="preserve">==Characteristics of the recovery phase == 

===General===
*Recovery includes actions necessary to assist communities to restore their everyday lives. This requires good collaboration and the participation of citizens in decision making.
*The ability of a community to accelerate the recovery process begins with its efforts in pre-disaster preparedness and overall resilience.
*Recovery is not only the restoration of a community’s physical structures. Of equal importance is helping the community and individuals to recover from their physical and emotional hardships and help strengthen their resilience.
*Monitoring of the situation, actions and needs of citizens and organisations involved is important.


===Public perception and motivation===
*The public is active in interacting with all actors in order to get back to normal.
*Matters of compensation will be more important in this phase.


==Recommendations supporting empowerment in the recovery phase==

*Rebuilding needs effort and public initiatives are needed.

*In this phase, initiatives on the part of all the actors involved can be encouraged, again utilizing contacts with citizen groups and intermediate organisations. All resources are useful and contacts with private organisations in the area also welcomed. An integral approach will focus on the functioning of society as a whole, including economic and social recovery.

*Much public initiative is needed, for example, cleaning up after a flooding or riot, to make a neighbourhood function again. 

*Monitoring social and news media helps to see how people are coping with implementing the activities needed in the recovery phase and what information and other needs they have. 

*Decisions often have to be made about how an area is to be rebuilt. Empowerment calls for participative decision making, involving the local citizens in setting aims and how the work will be done. Recovery is all too often delegated to organisations that tend not to include citizen views.

*Property damage will need to be addressed, e.g. through insurance claims.

*Emotional aspects also need attention, for example, by spokespersons, showing that affected families are not forgotten. Public initiatives for sharing and mourning can be supported, for example, by memorial events and websites. Social networks have an important role, not only in the online environment but also face to face in groups and associations. Individual physical and psychological support needs to continue as long as this is needed. 


==Technology aspects and how it supports the recovery phase==

===Technology aspects===
*Technology will be restored gradually.
*This phase often reveals a number of systems and applications with conflicting or out-dated information.

===How technology could support public resilience===
*Social media can provide a channel for bi-directional communication between the organisations and citizens involved, and a common platform for people to share their concerns and experiences and possibly build a sense of community which, in turn, can be of assistance in the crisis recovery stage.
*Social media platforms can be utilized in encouraging donations.
*Facilitating the supply of support and mobilizing volunteers can be done through social networks. Technologies can be used to indicate what kinds of contributions are needed and where, and/or provide interactive mapping of available resources (e.g. where generators, clean water, food or shelter can be found)

==Examples of best practices==
*Transition Network  http://www.transitionnetwork.org/  
*Empowering the public, USA  http://epic.cs.colorado.edu/
*Community Resilience System, USA  http://www.resilientus.org/
*The American Red Cross Volunteer App allows receiving and responding to push notifications for volunteer jobs based on the user's location and enables sharing volunteer opportunities with friends to encourage additional volunteers: 
http://www.redcross.org/mobile-apps/volunteer-app 



[[Category:Public Empowerment Guidelines]]
[[Category:After a crisis ]]
[[Category: PEP ]]</rev>
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      <page pageid="20" ns="0" title="Response phase (phase 4)">
        <revisions>
          <rev contentformat="text/x-wiki" contentmodel="wikitext" xml:space="preserve">==Characteristics of the response phase==  

===General===
*The preparedness plans are implemented and it is important to remember that their feasibility is vital for success. 
*Includes actions taken to save lives, property and environment, and prevent further damage in the crisis situation.
*Will affect various authorities, NGOs and ad hoc groups, as well as individual citizens.
*Information exchange and coordination within the response organisation and within the overall response network is essential.
*It is important that all public groups, including vulnerable groups, have access to timely and correct information.
*The information targeted at citizens has to be updated continuously and the needs of public groups should be monitored and analysed.

===Public perception and motivation===
*There are various groups with different needs and urgency, such as the injured, uninjured, family and friends, those not affected but in immediate danger, etc.
*The people in most urgent need may not be able to communicate or actively search for information.
*The role of voluntary and ad hoc groups is important.
*Depending on the emergency and the local culture, the public may not understand or trust all the information provided.
*The public needs understandable information on the situation at hand, instead of probabilities and specialist jargon. 


==Recommendations supporting empowerment in the response phase==

*At this stage active engagement is needed, while failure of the communications infrastructure may make it difficult to reach people, hence alternatives may need attention.

*The high level of interest and urgency challenges resources. To cope needs good contacts with local groups and communities, non-governmental organisations, other civil society actors and private organisations. The evolving situation calls for developing new forms of collaboration that fit the situation. 

*Providing personally relevant and targeted information continues directly through various channels, and in addition via intermediary organisations.

*Information and other needs of citizens are clarified by monitoring social and news media, also to counteract the spreading of false information.

*The public can be asked to share information, for example pictures and videos of damage in the area, with authorities. This can then be shared with others. 

*Spokespersons give meaning to what has happened and show empathy. 

*Citizens can share experiences in social media networks to help cope with the situation. Authorities can link to citizen initiatives on their own channels. 


==Technology aspects and how it supports the response phase==

===Technology aspects===
*The technology infrastructure may be severely affected by the crisis. It is important to gather knowledge of the actual status of the relevant communication networks.
*The authorities will usually have back-up systems at their disposal, although with limited functionality and band width, especially those for field units.
*FM radio broadcasting will usually function regardless of the emergency.
*Internet and social media applications may also start to function quite soon, at least in a fragmented manner (i.e. some people can be reached but not all).
*The re-charging of batteries might be a problem.

===How technology can support public resilience===
*Social media applications have good scalability to maintain capacity for high volumes; even when the phone lines are down, the internet might still work. 
*Microblogging services serve well in communicating brief, real-time information updates that might not cross over in traditional mass media.
*Technological communication solutions enable the public to collaborate and participate in the process, for example by acting as sensors on the ground, utilizing mobile technology, or participating globally from anywhere by taking part in crowdsourcing actions, such as microtasking.
*Crisis mapping application techniques can visualize crisis developments in real time.
*Transforming a mass of data into usable information can be done by computational / technological solutions (data mining, crowdsourcing, web-based systems for filtering, searching and analysing information about the crisis situation) or with the help of digital volunteers. The information provided can be validated using various means, such as geo-locating, keywords and language processing, amount of similar or same content posted, and URLs. 
*Multimedia capabilities of mobile phones can be used to adapt information into a form that can more readily be  perceived and understood by the phone’s user.
*Shared platforms (Wikis, Sharepoint, Google Docs) enable several actors to create, share and upload documents from anywhere with internet access in order to coordinate knowledge and action between response organisations. 

==Examples of best practices==
*Ushahidi/ Crowdmap www.ushahidi.com / http://ushahidi.com/products/crowdmap/
*Community Resilience system, UK http://www.communityresilience.cc/
*Sahana software for interactive mapping was used for targeting response actions after the Haiti Earthquake in 2010: http://sahanafoundation.org/deployments/haiti-earthquake-of-2010/ 
*The Australian Emergency Management Institute has a DisasterWatch application that provides publicly available news and information about disasters in Australia via direct feeds from a range of authoritative sources in the States and Territories and nationally. (http://www.em.gov.au/Resources/Pages/DisasterWatchPhoneApp.aspx)
*Safeandwell.org, Google Person Finder: the American Red Cross offers a service called ‘Safe and well’ in which a register is set up that enables people in a disaster area to report that they are safe and  that can be searched by concerned family and friends. With Google Person Finder one can report missing and found persons. http://google.org/personfinder/global/home.html

[[Category:Public Empowerment Guidelines]]
[[Category:During a crisis]]
[[Category: PEP]]</rev>
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