Crisis Management 3.0: Social Media and Governance in Times of Transition

Commons Lab of the Science and Technology Innovation Program, Woodrow Wilson Center. Co-hosts: Global Health Initiative, Inc. and National Defense University

Crises in the United States and around the world are happening with increasing frequency, severity, and complexity, and with exponentially increasing economic and human cost.  During these times of transition, social networks have become an increasingly important mechanism in preventing, responding to and managing crises, especially in circumstances in which unity of effort can be achieved, but unity of command may not be feasible, or even desirable. Web 2.0 social networks, unfortunately, have important limitations and are creating challenges to vertically organized institutions.  Resolving the potential and actual conflicts between horizontally and vertically organized approaches, as well as nurturing the development of new synergies between horizontal and vertical organizations is stimulating new thinking about the nature of governance during times of significant transition, as well as stimulating the emergence of “Web 3.0 Resilience Systems.”  

The Crisis Management 3.0 panel and roundtable discussion will address the following questions:

1) What is the Crisis Management 3.0 paradigm, which may utilize distributed smart grids and how is it different from Crisis Management 2.0, which utilizes Web 2.0 social networks, or traditional emergency management?

2) How can intelligent social networks be enhanced to improve the development of agile, solution-based institutions, which utilize “smart swarms” to enhance resilience and sustainability in high severity crises?

3) How can governments and other large, vertically organized institutions adopt new approaches to governance that effectively incorporate participatory processes and engage social network-enhanced, horizontally managed citizen groups?

4) How can Web 3.0 Resilience Systems appropriately manage and work with social discontent to move toward proactive engagement? Can this happen at a time when the public is losing trust in government and vertically managed institutions?

5) If the United States faces strategic challenges that the government alone is unable to successfully address, how could these resilience systems help secure the health and human security of Americans?

For more information, please contact Kathy Gilbeaux by email at gilbojer@aol.com or by phone at (409) 738-5156.

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