www.krowd.app
krowd@krowdthink.com
Making the crowd a participatory threat sensor and responder
The public are not the only resource major public spaces should consider as assets. Why employ 500 more stewards when the eyes and ears of all your other staff, in ticketing, concession stalls, catering, cleaning and on-site contracting can also be recruited to the security agenda? Without any training! Although it never harms to guide them through the publically available and excellent ACT program. Such staff are even more motivated than the visiting public to participate and are more readily guidable to do so. We live in a digital world, everyone has a mobile device, but who downloads a security app just in case they see something? Few, and even if they did, do they remember it at an appropriate time? Digital engagement technology adoption needs a new way of thinking if it’s to add to the security objective and foster the crowd’s active participation. The issues they worry about are probably not terror issues, but they may worry about a lost child, or they may be strongly motivated to assist in stamping out racist chanting or homophobic abuse in public spaces. More likely they’ll want access to venue offers, live news feeds, social interaction - these are the things that primarily motivate the digital generation. But they are also increasingly a generation that does not want to ‘get involved’, so only by understanding crowd behavior can we properly introduce a new way of enhancing our safe spaces. Only by doing so inline with current legislation can we invest in solutions that have longevity. The OSCT’s funding award unlocked the doors to that investment and we will provide more details at the BAPCO conference. This is a prevent solution, like See It, Say It, Sorted, - It creates a hostile environment to hostiles when its’ use is publicized. You may hide from the cameras but you cannot hide from the crowd. But it’s also a public service, a way of differentiating the responsiveness of a venue to issues, and consumer expectations are very high in this regard. More and more security teams are recognizing the role they play in making the venue welcoming, so that safety is ‘felt’, comfort includes a sense of security, yet at the same time, unobtrusive and non-threatening, but is visible, accessible and reassuring at the same time. Digital solutions have to match this emerging ethic.
www.twitter.com/@krowdthink
Can we go beyond Prevent?
A communication platform that enables public engagement with venue security has potential other uses, in prepare/response for example. If it allows crowd engagement with one another, how would the crowd use it in an emergency, for example in a Marauding Terror Attack? Kerslake, in his review of the Manchester arena response, highlighted that what held true in the 7/7 attack in 2005 held true in Manchester too, but we don’t seem to have acted on either recommendation yet! i.e. the crowd should be considered as a force multiplier, an asset to leverage as ground zero responders who can manage things before first responders are on the scene, and as an information asset once first responders are on the scene. There are plenty of mass notification systems – we are not talking about that, we are talking about crowd communication, two-way broadcast communication across the crowd. Live trials of venues under such attack show that crisis creates community, but that community cannot form unless the communication doors are open, and in a venue lockdown that becomes problematic. What’s needed is the ability for the community under attack to be able to communicate with one another. In our BAPCO talk we’ll highlight some of the key lessons learned from such trials and explain how crowds in crisis actually respond when enabled to communicate.
Live deployment lessons
The first and foremost lesson learned in live deployments is that every venue and venue type is different. Sounds obvious, but the interesting thing is how some things are common. Engaging shopkeepers and shoppers in a retail mall is a very different proposition to engaging fans and stadia staff on a sports match day. Their primary engagement motivators differ significantly, yet their basic interest in communication and receiving good service from a venue remains the same, as does their expectations from a digital/social messaging platform in either place-based context. The staff make up of every venue is a convoluted mix of full and part-time staff, spread across multiple operational areas, supported by contract staff that can be semi-permanent or temporary. The challenge is to enable their engagement, alongside the public, because ‘they are there’. Resolving the ‘check-in’ challenge so that the crowds and venue staff are connected is the key to unlocking the engagement value proposition by turning your visitors and wider organisation into a safety and security asset.