Social Edens Building, mining, and monetizing dynamic online communities Author Dr. Yoav Intrator, GM Enterprise Architecture, Microsoft Services Publication Date: May 2013 Acknowledgments The author wants to thank the following people who contributed to, reviewed, and helped improve this white paper: Norm Judah Marc Mercuri George Anderson Marc Ashbrook Jon Tobey Mark Hoffman Yuri Misnik Introduction Imagine that you’re working in Macau for six months, and your wife has come to visit you. Several weeks before her visit, you joined an online social environment that alerts you whenever any groups in that environment form to alert you of events and topics near you that might interest you, such as Macanese folk-pop concerts, sailing events, and natural disasters. This morning, you left for work just as your wife left to play golf with a friend on Coloane Island to the south. At 9:37 a.m., the building where you work in central Macau starts to shake violently. You run outside and see hundreds of other workers from surrounding buildings. You try several times to call your wife’s smart phone but can’t get through. Then you receive a text message on your smart phone that asks if you want to join a group in the social environment called “Macau earthquake group,” or MEG for short. You click a link on the text message, enter your credentials for the social environment, and see on your smart phone the home page for MEG. It’s fully configured for an emergency and includes a link to the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System web site (www.gdacs.org) complemented with suggestions about what to do during and after a major earthquake, along with emergency organizations and rescue locations in and near Macau. It displays a button that says, “Tell your family and friends you’re safe.” You press the button and see a pre-written message that says, “I’m OK. How about you?” It shows your current location in latitude and longitude. You recall that when you subscribed to “natural disasters near me” groups in the social environment, you provided a list of contacts such as your wife and children plus their phone numbers to whom you could send such a message. You make minor edits to the message and press “Send.” Other pages linked from MEG’s home page include news feeds from earthquake experts worldwide, text messages from eyewitnesses all over Macau, and even a few photos and video clips of the earthquake from eyewitnesses. Along the bottom of a map of the Macau region, you see scrolling text updates about the quake and feeds from local governmental and volunteer agencies that provide information about shelters and aid services. The continuously updating Macau map on your smart phone Social Edens Building, mining, and monetizing dynamic online communities shows that most of the roads and bridges in Macau and Coloane are damaged. You see short, Twitter-like messages from people who joined MEG, and you send one of your own to say you’re safe outside your building. You also see tweets with hashtags #eqinmacau and #eqinmacauneedhelp that offer links to important resources. Some of your coworkers and Macau friends also joined MEG. You see several of them tagged in the onscreen map of Macau, but you don’t see your wife. After you send her another text message, you’re delighted to see her texting back. She’s OK. She read your “I’m OK” message and your text messages. She’s still near the golf course on Coloane, and she just clicked a link in your ‘I’m OK” message to an invitation to join the Macau earthquake group. A minute later her icon appears on the group’s map. At 9:57 A.M., you receive a text message that a tsunami is heading toward Macau and will hit the region at about 10:30 A.M. You zoom in on the Macau map on your smart phone, and it shows where the tsunami might reach in various scenarios, from best-case to worst. The golf course on Coloane is inundated in every scenario. Your wife is in the path of imminent death. You text her again and tell her to get out of Coloane or, if she can’t do that, head to high ground. She texts you back that she knows about the tsunami; she received the same message over MEG’s texting environment. She’s trying to get out of Coloane, but if she can’t, she’ll head to a hill just north of the golf course that’s 300 feet above sea level. A text message tells you to head to the hills west of Macau if you can get there. You have no car, but one of your coworkers does, and MEG’s map shows that he’s driving toward the Zhuhai Avenue Bridge on Macau’s west side, which he discovered was open by reading a post on MEG. You text him to pick up you and two other people neither of you know personally but whom you engaged via MEG, and you all agree to rendezvous nearby. You meet there and squeeze into your coworker’s car and drive over the Zhuhai Avenue Bridge and veer south to the Nanyuan hotel. They all clamber out and hike up into the hills above. You stay behind in the rapidly filling hotel parking lot while you follow your wife’s progress on MEG’s map as she and her friend try to flee Coloane. Using MEG, they found a friend who has a car. The map shows that all the bridges north of Coloane are down, and traffic is backed up behind them, so they drive instead toward the Estrada Flor de Lotus Bridge to the west, which the map shows is still open. They then drive west, north, and finally east to the Nanyuan Hotel. You run to her at the back of the parking lot, and as you embrace she apologizes for being late as usual. Then you both hike up the hill. At 10:33 A.M., the tsunami hits. From your perch in the hills west of Macau you watch, terrified, as the tsunami tears through large swathes of the city and surrounding countryside. But you’re safe; the tsunami’s waters don’t even reach the hotel’s parking lot below you. You wonder who among your coworkers survived. After examining Macau’s online maps on the MEG site, you see that all of them are in the hills around you, among the thousands of people who’ve made it to safety here. By 1:00 P.M., the tsunami has receded. MEG’s text messages suggest that aid groups are already responding, and the US Navy is on the way with emergency supplies and help. You and your wife read posts on MEG hour by hour as the horror of the earthquake and tsunami hit home: more than 100,000 people killed and more than $10 billion in damage. Truck convoys bring in food, sleeping blankets, and tents, and helicopters bring in medical supplies for the thousands of people stranded in the hills above Macau. You read about five separate people trapped by earthquake debris who were found by sending text messages to MEG; rescuers geolocated two trapped victims from her text messages. You also read about dozens of people stranded by the tsunami who found rescuers through MEG. The MEG solution saved countless lives today. It was the only functioning real-time information source during the disaster. The thousands of tweets, photos, videos, and personal stories by tsunami survivors that are archived on the MEG make for riveting reading. A month later, its members visit it mostly to reflect on how they survived the disaster. New feeds appear in it to explain how to file insurance claims and how to rebuild damaged buildings and homes. With the help of those posts and your insurance Page ii Social Edens Building, mining, and monetizing dynamic online communities company, you file a claim for your and your wife’s personal items, which you left back at your hotel before the tsunami. Two months after the earthquake, a Macau newspaper claims that far fewer people would have been killed if earthquake experts had given advance warning of the tsunami. The newspaper hints that this lack of warning was purposeful: Western scientists in league with their governments, it claims, wanted to destroy Macau. Many people in Macau believe the newspaper. You email the newspaper to point out that earthquake experts all over the world warned of a tsunami more than an hour before it hit, but Macau’s infrastructure simply wouldn’t let enough people leave the city in time. The reporter who wrote the story emails you to say, “You’re wrong. Prove it.” You send her and her editor an invitation to join MEG, with its visualization tools for the archived trove of the earthquake and tsunami information, and you send the same invitation to two other major newspapers in Macau. Then you ask selected friends on MEG to send the same invitation to the editors of the top 25 newspapers in the world. The newspaper that published the original story prints a retraction, and the reporter who wrote the story resigns. These events and the resulting news bring a burst of new members to MEG, all seeking to find out what actually happened during the earthquake and tsunami. A reporter at The New York Times uses the group’s trove of information to write a long analysis of what happened during the Macau disaster.