To ensure others can mashup and contribute to useful services.

Useful data like fire warnings, weather information, water information, there is a giant raft of useful gov information that could be made subscribable and thus easier to aggregate into useful and up to date mashup services.

When there's an emergency, people who are affected don't have the time to send a text message. If there was a way to access the mobile phone signals from the affected areas, emergency controllers would be able to see any 'flee patterns' of mobile users moving in particular directions. This would work on the basis of physical location of the mobile phone, rather than billing address which may not always be relevant to a particular situation.

A way of overcoming the credibility issues with social media intel from the cloud in an emergency situation is to find a means by which emergency controllers can make direct contact with the source of information to verify it.

Much time is lost in bureaucracy, and in setting up the same solutions from scratch on every occasion. We should have a templated, standard solution, accessible from a standard location, that only needs the data filled in. This would significantly reduce the "start-up time" for data distribution during the early phases of an emergency.

Create a twitter map mashup whereby all emergency related tweets are shown on a map, aggregated where possible (RTs, etc).

As they verify information, Emergency Services change the colour of verified tweets to indicate the information is reliable. 'Raw' (unverified) tweets could be yellow, for example, then verified could be orange.

To be able to target a broadcast emergency SMS to mobile phones in affected areas, customers with mobile accounts could be offered an 'opt out' service that gives emergency authorities the ability to send them a text or call in the case of an emergency.

Social media is about stories, and hearing someone else’s experience is compelling - how about using Twitter Mike - encourage people to tweet audio comments with hashtags - this could be useful as education, preparedness and also for post-event recovery and analysis.

Negotiate with social media services to enable 'offical' messages to over-ride other messages, making them more noticeable - ie, use these services as another emergency broadcast channel.

Using e.g. Satellite imagery (before/after) an event, and feature extraction algorithms, a geographic footprint of affected area (e.g. burnt, flooded) can be quickly generated. This needs to be made available as a feed for people to use in mashups, to identify assets, people, etc. that are affected.

Trendsmap is a simple yet powerful monitoring tool to locally track twitter trends. It's value as an early warning tool is illustrated by how it picked up the September 09 Samoan Tsunami event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlL-foAGizk

Exploring the feasibility of setting up an equivalent to the UK Resilient Nation project to help Australians prepare for and cope with natural (and other) disasters.

http://groups.google.com.au/group/resilient-nation-australia

Point your (GPS and camera enabled) mobile device at an area and automatically display GeoRSS incident feeds, uploaded photos of damage reports, or agency requests for information ("Can someone tell us what's happening here or send a photo?")

The EAS in the U.S. is being revised to take advantage of experience and the capabilities of digital radio and TV. See www.globalcom123.com/eas and http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/rw_20091118/index.php?startid=44 .
This implements CAP alerts into broadcast much better and has a CAP broadcast mode for the future. In American Samoa, EAS saved many lives.

One challenge with 'filtering' or monitoring twitter feeds is that keywords & hashtags can be unpredectible and change over time. How would an agency know which Trending Topics to follow?