Mission Possible ... holding an #smem congress

Your mission, should you chose to accept it .... is to promote the holding of the first #smem congress.

Now, I'm on a bit of a crusade. I've recently started thinking what it would be like to gather the top 100 people related to the #smem hashtag. (social media in emergency management). There is no limit to what could be achieved in promoting community resilience, effective disaster planning, efficient crisis communications and stimulate further citizen and volunteer involvement, if we could get all of them is a single locale for even just a day. The key: refining the use of social media, mobile technologies and the power of the crowd and the cloud as force multipliers for GOOD ... for safer and stronger cities, towns and countries ... 

I'm thinking we could have groups focusing on:

• social media in all pillars of EM ...from preparedness to recovery
• social media as situational enhancement and decision-making support tools
• crowdsourcing and crisis mapping
• social media, emergency information and crisis communications

That's just the tip of the SMEM iceberg really ... there are fantastic people out there who share great stories and practices on a daily basis. I'm thinking the synergies that could be gained by increasing the power of online networking with stronger human contacts resulting from a face-to-face, IRL (in real-life) meeting could be the start of a paradigm shift.

So, I call on all of us ... to work our contacts ... make noise, so we can attract the attention and obtain the largess of a white knight ... a giant that could make this a reality ... There must be some benefits from behemoths such as Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and others ... in sponsoring such a gathering ...

I think it'd be easy to form a working group with 5-6 people who could put a list of the top 100 together ...

So, it's mission POSSIBLE ... let's make #smem100 a reality.