Social networks as a tool for campus security
Since the tragedy at Virginia Tech just about every higher education campus is dusting off their emergency plan. Why the Montreal shooting in September didn’t have the same effect is beyond me. I suppose people related it more to high school, although a CGEP is more like a Univeristy campus than a high school… anyway people are looking at security and communication with students, staff, and faculty. For some reason they are fixating on mobile phones and SMS as theanswer to all this. That is wrong, it is only a part of the puzzle.
The problem
The problem is defined as how can we get a blast message out to people on campus immediately. I don’t think anyone is expecting to reach everyone at once but reach enough people that the word will get out quickly. SMS is really good for that. A recent poll of students on the Waterloo campus (1300 respondents) has just over 70% of students with mobile phones. If you have all their numbers and an application to blast it out and you assume most have their phone on, just hope they aren’t desensitized to SMS enough that they will check it within a few minutes of it being received. There you go, problem solved.
There are some problems with this theory though. Like the bouncing IM client on their desktop, how many students ignore the instant message part of SMS? How many have their phones on? How many have the same number they entered (likely more now thanks to number portability)? If students are following the rules, their phones are off or silent in class as well.
I think you will reach a lot students with SMS but I don’t think you would reach enough to rely solely on a SMS alert system. I think an alert needs to go out over SMS, email, IM, post on web pages, and ideally even send an alert over the Facebook Waterloo network (23 500 people in that now).
The solution: social networks.
If you look at a system like twitter, you have IM and phone settings but you also have an active user base. If you sent an alert over a social network that has an active user base I think you are far more likely to reach people. It is just amazing how quickly word gets out on twitter. Back to the Virginia Tech tragedy, students and the media turned to social networks for information. That certainly validates their utility.
With the social network theory as my motivation, I have been working with a great group of people under the banner MMNP to create a twitter like application for the UW community that will have an alert feature. It will send out an alert to all the communication venues the user has in their profile.
I will talk about this topic and demo our application this weekend at BarCampWaterloo. Then I will demo it again at Design Camp Waterloo (they really need to plug that into the BarCamp wiki) on the 17th of May. After that the app will go into public use mode but the server likely won’t be stable for a while. We are just finding our way with Mongrel clusters 
