When disaster strikes, count on tweets and data; Social media is increasingly becoming an important tool for emergency management and response.

Update:  Here is an example of the use of social media for Typhoon Ruby/

I read this article in today’s Washington Post and found it remarkable for a couple of reasons. One is that it was written by the head of Brookings, a liberal think tank, and two it provides an economic argument to support the current push for resilience and “whole of community” efforts by the White House, FEMA, and other federal agencies.

See: How Washington made itself irrelevant. The intro paragraphs are as follows:

Now that the midterms are behind us, let’s have an honest assessment of what’s really happening in our nation’s capital: The federal government’s power is diminishing. Washington is becoming less effective at addressing many of our nation’s problems and less consequential in bolstering the cities and regions that drive the economy.

Given the excessive partisanship on display, it’s tempting to blame Washington’s stumbling solely on ideological polarization. But that’s not the case. The source of the federal government’s feebleness is structural, and until its run-down foundations are addressed, Washington’s influence around the country will continue to wane.

In the past, Washington has been in the business of investing at scale in the assets that drive the economy, including education, infrastructure and research and development. No longer. Instead, we now have a shrunken pool of resources for investments, a piecemeal approach to delivering funding and few mechanisms that tie the capital to the rest of the country.

From the NJ Spotlight, an account of private donations and the means of acquiring them regarding H. Sandy recovery. See: Private Donations Fuel New Jersey’s Long-Term Recovery from Hurricane Sandy; Two years after the storm, a look at where the money went and what lessons we can learn. Some excerpts:

As might be expected with a recovery of this scale, however, it has been far from flawless. Some big charities had trouble delivering local services, there were delays in handing out the money, isolated instances of fraud, and concerns about funding not always going where donors had intended it to go. Experts say valuable lessons can be learned from the way private charities and foundations handled Sandy and other disasters and that we should make changes and improvements to ensure that future recoveries are dealt with in a more efficient and transparent manner.

Despite the difficulties, by all accounts, the aid from these groups has been instrumental in the recovery, so some are worried that the funding is now running out, even though great needs remain. As is typical of large-scale disasters, donor enthusiasm has largely dried up now that Sandy has faded from the headlines, leaving nonprofits scrambling to figure out how to continue their important work.