Colleges are experimenting with Facebook and other social networks to notify students about emergencies like crimes and floods—and get vital information in return. Most emergency-alert systems send out warnings. But social networks give students a chance to add on-the-scene reports or trade information if trouble hits. In addition to cell-phone and e-mail alerts, the social networks also give colleges yet another way to reach students in a crisis.
The prospect has some safety officials excited by the possibilities of letting students trade crisis information over Facebook and MySpace, but others worried that it could open an alert system up to misleading rumors.
The University of Maryland at College Park set up a Facebook group last month for "emergency awareness" at the university. Any emergency message that the university issues on its other alert systems, which can go to cell phones, university Web pages, and e-mail accounts, will also be posted to the Facebook group. The group also lists tips about emergency preparedness, photographs of drills by emergency staff, and other information.
"Students aren't using traditional methods of getting information from authorities," said Maj. Jay Gruber, of the university's police department. "So I wanted to think outside the box and think of ways that students do get information."
Mr. Gruber also had to think outside his own comfort zone. He did not have a Facebook account before he embarked on this project, so he had a couple of student employees give him a tutorial on social networking.
So far, only campus police officials are allowed to post announcements to the group's main discussion area, though there is a smaller discussion area that participants can use, and Mr. Gruber said he might soon open the group up further. "I'm interested in working out how it could be a two-way platform—not only out to people but in to us during an emergency."
A group of researchers at the university is also working to build a prototype of a homemade social network for the university's Web site designed for use in emergency situations. The project is an outgrowth of work by Ben Shneiderman, a professor of computer science at the university, and Jennifer J. Preece, dean of the university's College of Information Studies. They published an article in Science last year proposing that local governments develop social networks to supplement 911 emergency hotlines.
Mr. Shneiderman said he got the idea after typing "911" into Google and getting no useful results. "I said, "Something is wrong here—I think of the Web as my source of communication."
Now a graduate student at Maryland, Philip Fei Wu, is building a prototype for university use. "We hope to create a platform to allow students to communicate, to exchange ideas, to comment on ideas" in an emergency, Mr. Wu said in an interview.
Experimenting With 2-Way Communication
One concern is that people could make false reports to the emergency system. But Mr. Wu said that the system, called a community-response grid, would be self-correcting. "If I'm saying that I heard a gunshot near the stadium at a certain time," but there wasn't any such activity, Mr. Wu said, "then other students would come up and say 'I was there at the same time and I didn't hear anything.'"
But not everyone is sold on allowing two-way communication on university emergency-notification systems.
Officials at the University of California at Los Angeles have been working with MySpace to build a system that will automatically post emergency alerts to a university MySpace page. The project has not yet been officially announced, but it should be ready in the next few months, said David S. Burns, emergency manager for UCLA.
The project was proposed and led by a Sara Cohen, who worked as an intern in Mr. Burns's office while she was a graduate student at UCLA. Ms. Cohen lived in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and found MySpace and Facebook to be the best sources of information then because cell-phone networks and other communication systems suffered outages, and she thought the university could proactively use social networks in future disasters.
Mr. Burns said the university hopes to share the computer code it has developed with other colleges. "It's not as easy as it sounds" to automate the process, he said.
But the university plans to turn off all ability for users to comment on the MySpace page, to keep rumor and false information off the site, said Mr. Burns.
At least a few other colleges—including Florida State University and the University of Iowa—are also exploring creating MySpace or Facebook pages for use in emergency alerts.
