Andrea DiMaio

Another interesting one-on-one at our European Symposium was with a client from a Defense agency in a Scandinavian country (yes, we have many clients from Scandinavia coming to Cannes). We were discussing about the impact of Web 2.0 to deal with crisis situations – ranging from flooding to nuclear accidents, from epidemics to terrorist attacks.

When dealing with these scenarios, an important discipline is Critical Infrastructure Protection, which looks at how to make sure that infrastructures that are mission-critical for a society and economy to function (and do depend on each other) do not collapse.

Our conversation was about the role of social networks in Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). As hurricane Katrina showed, social software can help enormously in bridging organizational gaps as well as complement and replace command and control structures when they have been severely disrupted. I guess that current scenarios for CIP do factor in how the social networking fabric can cushion impact as well as accelerate recovery.

On the other hand, what if social networks are part of the same critical infrastructure to be protected? Assuming they become fundamental in gathering information, as well as organizing voluntary efforts and non-government resources to complement government initiatives, what if they get attacked or discontinued? How can methodologies and techniques developed for “traditional” infrastructure cope with the criticality of social networks? If electronic government communication gets interrupted, an emergency procedure will suggest to switch to phone and ultimately paper. But who is responsible for arranging the emergency procedures for a social network? And do we have a phone or physical address to reach out to when all communication with a network of friends has been purely electronic? Is it plausible that in a not-too-distant future the loss of our Facebook or LinkedIn contacts, or Tweeter feeds, will grind our ability to react to emergencies to a halt?