Building Civil Protection 2.0

The Italian Civil Protection is a complex and interralated system that involves diverse operational corps and organizations: fire brigades, forest forces, armed forces, volunteers organisations (more or less 1.3 million people) – Red Cross, National Health service, National Scientific research groups.

In the last 3 years, 2 projects have been set up in order to promote a civil protection culture based on users collaboration approach. Ispro is a private institute founded by the father of the Italian Civil Protection, and the web site was conceived and implemented (drupal, wikimedia) as a public platform where users can contribute to set up a shared knowledge in the field, exchange ideas and experiences, through a wiki, gmap information, forums, and a community (ning). Particularly the same type of community, set up in ispro.it for volunteers, has been used by one organisation to manage the volunteers activities and interventions also when the earthquake in Abruzzo occurred.

Civil Protection for Mayors: an e-learning project developed by Formez (Italian National training agency) and National Department of Civil Protection whose aim was to train Italian mayors so to fill the gap on civil protection issues. The moodle platform became a point of interest for not only 2.000 users, but also for some volunteers organisations, that used the training materials and forum to train the volunteers.

These two experiences show that despite of the low Italian Internet penetration the web is a free-will tool used by a lot of volunteer organisations and public administrations at a local level. Moreover during the early phase of the Abruzzo earthquake both Facebook and Twitter played a role to inform and organize solidarity rescue intervention, and now are channels to communicate the state of the art in some rescue camps (see «roio piano» group in Facebook). These experiences demonstrate that the web could represent an effective tool to manage the great amount of information and data flows the civil protection system has to deal with during a major disaster: certificates of use, goods provision, rescued population census, day-by-day information from the command & control head quarters, and so on.

It is time the civil protection community acknowledges that Web 2.0 is crucial in emergency management and preparedness programmes. Exchange of experiences and ideas in this field (such as the InSteDD projects or our national experiences) could help the disaster managers community both to switch from the day-after approach to the day-before one, and to find out a common way to set up standards and tools to better cope with a major disaster and crisis.