Probably one of the most dangerous crises faced by cities in the near future will be resource riots, where a shortage of food or fuel. The world saw some of this already, in the
fuel and food price surge leading up to the current economic collapse.
There are several sorts of information you'd want to keep track of in such an emergency:
1. Locations where roads are blocked, or where bus and train service is disrupted
2. Locations where emergency resources are being distributed (food or fuel rations, for example)
3. Locations where emergency resources are needed (by people who can't reach the above, including injured people)
4. Locations where emergency services are disrupted (emergency rooms full, or hospitals with unreliable power and insufficient generator fuel, police stations beset by rioters)
5. Locations where emergency services are reliable
6. Locations of conflict (violence, arrests)
7. Locations that are hazardous for other reasons (fires, etc.)
Actually, the above applies pretty well to all sorts of disaster situations.
The key difference in situations of political unrest is that the same tools used to maintain order can be used to disrupt order, so various groups (including governments) might be trying to disrupt communications at a time of political crisis. An interesting question is how a disaster response system could be made resilient against malicious actors.
The internet is fairly resistant to disruption, as the Iranian government found during the recent
election protests. Not that the internet is invulnerable to disruption when the ISPs are in state hands, it's just very hard to disrupt that sort of infrastructure for only some people/uses. The Iranian government could have made it difficult for anyone in the country to access the internet at all, but that would have been too costly to the economy and too disruptive to the functioning of the government itself. I'd be a bit more worried about the reliability of the cell-phone network in a political crisis.
Also, it's worth noting that as communication tools get better, the difference between tools useful for disaster response (real-time, local) and tools useful for journalism (rich, providing a broad context) shrinks. Consider crowd-sourced news sites like
NowPublic and
Spot.us, disaster response tools like
Ushahidi and
SAHANA, and sites like
Flickr,
YouTube, and
Twitter. The ability to produce and obtain local, real-time information has never been higher, the question is how to sort out the wheat from the chaff, how to turn timely, local, brief (but possibly unreliable) bits of information into a detailed, comprehensive, accurate picture of what's going on at a given time. There's a good "save the world and make money" project for sure.
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