In 2011 as the worldwide Avian flu pandemic swept across Southern California one of the problems that emerged was how to get reliable epidemiological information from the many small immigrant groups scattered across the area. For instance there is a significant population of Mixteca in Oxnard, California and several populations of Hmong in Orange County, California. These people groups tend to be insular, self-supporting and largely invisible to social services personnel. There is a great fear that they will not seek treatment and that flu outbreaks will go largely unreported until the crisis becomes severe.
Working with my team I decide to use Foursquare to quickly contact local "experts" who can be eyes and ears in various neighorhoods. These experts work quickly to connect with other local authorities whom they can find easily using the Foursquare geolocation game.
Once the "Foursquare authorities" are identified they use Google Maps to mark city areas that have immigrant populations, plus they locate any community leaders that they find, providing realtime information about the pandemic in their neighborhoods. This information can then be filtered and prioritized by response teams who are able to recognize whether or not the data collected indicates a potential hot zone.
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