Here is a great riff on the failure of the state planners to be prepared for mass network of volunteers. It is the same situation we are going to see play out again and again in disasters, pandemics and campaigns.

Our strategists have failed to think of the ways distributed volunteers connected can help. They only get one shot at the thousands of people interested in acting.

We often ask in the presentation what would you do with 10,000 people of 10 minutes each? Well here was another one of those the moments. I can not see why any state, governor and federal agency does not have a flexible adaptable mass volunteering management program.

The process would use an adaptable template (to be finely tuned by volunteers in the first hours of a crisis) that would establish communication lines, ad hoc work teams, tasks to be completed, quality control on tasks and feedback and shared traffic analysis in an open system so that volunteers and outsiders can contribute and review overall progress. Team would be screened by volunteers, quality control and debriefing on finished tasks would be done by volunteers. Volunteers would be able to queue up work, help prioritize a queue and check out tasks. Volunteers would be assigned to verify tasks progress and completion. Volunteers would be associated with their own performance. In such a system, redundancy of volunteer effort assures quality ...not screening and checking of infomation by a central staff as a screen on the way in... design a volunteer system that scales and can't become "overloaded" with interest. It will only work in these types of instances but it is the best way to leverage the education, skills, and distributed work power of our culture.
There is only one way to design networked volunteerism and that is a way that grows stronger with each new volunteer.

You think a state fisheries officer ever organized 1500 people to do anything in a day? No. However, the RNC and DNC operatives do that every weekend. Door knocking in Iowa of organizing the field clean up actually have lots of the same logistics. It is rediculous that after 9/11, Katrina, wildfires we are not working more diligently to establish mass volunteer coordination systems.

If you open up the conversation the state agency gets over whelmed....we then ask the network of volunteers to filter incoming emails.

Link: Green Wombat: San Francisco oil spill is a tech disaster.

The masses may be wired but California authorities' disaster response was strictly 1.0, as Green Wombat discovered when he showed up at a meeting on Saturday called by the state Department of Fish and Game to brief would-be volunteers about the oil spill from the Cosco Busan. The container ship hit the Bay Bridge last Wednesday, dumping 58,000 gallons of heavy oil into the water. A couple hundred people crammed a room at the Richmond Marina in the East Bay, spilling outside into the drizzling rain. As the crowd peppered officials with questions about how they could get to work -- a few yards away a dull oily sheen streaked the harbor -- DFG representatives patiently explained that volunteers must first receive training before they can be allowed to handle wildlife or clean beaches covered in a hazardous substance.

"We have to get information from you to place you," said a representative from the DFG's Office of Spill Prevention and Response as paper forms were handed out for volunteers to fill in. They soon ran out of forms -- more than 500 people had shown up at another volunteer meeting held a few hours earlier in San Francisco. Many members of the audience, BlackBerries and Treos in hand, stared in disbelief. Paper?

Nuts.