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  You’ve no doubt heard about volunteers across the globe helping assist with Haitian, Libyan, and other crises by crowd sourcing: geolocating and tagging new reports and data from a wide variety of news sources like phones, web forms, tweets, email and more. By filtering for keywords and locating these reports on a map, a wide variety of emergency managers, researchers, and citizens can rapidly get a better feeling for late breaking information – well before a reporter or others have had time to synthesize the data into a summary or overview.

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The Pacific Northwest is exploring solutions that can provide officials an overview of a regional event.

The existing situation is very fragmented:

WA State is currently using ESI’s WebEOC (for which Vashon has an account) & ESiWebFUSION but this has an older architecture & cumbersome user interface and doesn’t readily allow integration with other technologies in use elsewhere.

The state has a wrapper or GIS based viewer for WebEOC, known as the Washington Information Sharing Environment (WISE) that also aggregates additional data (including from the military, as it was developed by the National Guard)

I’m not aware of what FEMA or DHS uses, but I suspect it is something else.

Neighboring states use WebEOC and other custom solutions. (Oregon is adopting – with some trouble- a more regional system: Virtual Emergency Network of Multnomah, for instance.)

King County has an independent...

We now have limited access to the evolving King County SharePoint web site that they will be using for situational awareness. Details on this will be maintained in the wiki, but let John know if you are interested in finding out more as it expands.