Collective intelligence for the design of emergency response

Collective Intelligence has received much attention in recent years, as organizations and businesses discover the power of crowds. With new technologies, such as blogs, twitter, wikis, photo sharing, collaborative tagging and social networking sites, people may create and disseminate content as never before. Many organizations are looking for ways to harness this power, which is being called collective intelligence. Additionally, many open-source initiatives have shown that it is possible to obtain high quality results from collectively produced work. In this paper, we consider the domain of emergency response. We have been working in this domain for a few years now, mostly focusing on small disaster relief groups and field command. One of the command problems is lack of information about the location where the disaster occurred. We believe some of this information could be crowdsourced, changing current practices and enabling more effective response to the situation. In this paper, we discuss the possibilities for crowdsourcing and present an initial proposal for harnessing collective intelligence for the fire department.