The bomb blasts in Mumbai last week sparked a surge of anger, grief and concern online. Within minutes, users on Twitter exchanged real-time updates even as people started offering all kinds of help.
Help via the Internet did not come from Mumbai alone but also from Delhi, Bangalore, Gujarat and Chennai, with many offering to call on behalf of anyone hamstrung by jammed phone lines. Tweets on last Wednesday, when the blasts occurred at three places, suggested use of SMS or Blackberry Messenger to avoid crippling the mobile network. An online Google Docs spreadsheet set up by Nitin Sagar from New Delhi with details of people offering food, lifts, accommodation, and information on the missing and injured persons, or even particular blood groups spread virally on Twitter.
Barely 30 minutes after the blasts, Ajay Kumar, a software engineer in Bokaro, devised a disaster tracker map on Ushahidi, a free open-source web and mobile platform. He flagged the map of Mumbai that pulled in tweets using #mumbaiblasts with geo-location data. An emergency response manager with a non-governmental organisation, Mr. Kumar says the major task was to sort out accurate and timely information from among the 2,000 tweets an hour, excluding “rants, sentimental and inflammatory reactions.” Volunteers from across the world, part of the standby task force, pooled in the information to set up a formulated protocol.
“We pushed people to check the time stamp, and not re-tweet more than once. It was necessary to be practical,” Mr. Kumar says, explaining how offers of blood donation from other places were not considered, given that the number of the injured could not exceed 500.
Residents of the city had mixed reactions. “I suppose Twitter people were trying to help Twitter people. There was so much help but few takers,” says Jharna Phule, a bank employee who was stranded in Chembur that evening. Ankit Garg, however, immediately received responses to his offer to drop people from Dadar to Mahim.
More than anything, the live traffic updates, reports on statistics, confirmation of taxi services, helpline and control room numbers, lists of the injured and missing persons helped a lot, says Raghu Purohit, a Mumbai resident. “The call for blood donation was not actually true, because most blood banks said they had sufficient blood,” he adds.
During the 2005 floods, themumbaihelp.blogspot.com was set up by some residents, while Twitter and other online services were used during the 26/11 terror attacks in 2008, says blogger Shivam Vij. “But with blogs, there is always a need for moderation. On Twitter, it is like thousands of people in a room where there is a spontaneous order created without even calling for it.”
Digital spaces are important in our information ecologies. But it would seem, as far as their effectiveness and penetration in solving the problems of the real world go, the jury is still out.
