Last week I was in Sydney for the day to participate in the 6th Annual Enterprise Risk Management for Government conference in Sydney. There I encountered a very engaged group of people from government, private sector and non-government organisations with a broad shared interest in risk management, particularly around emergency management and disaster risk reduction. As well as my own presentation based on our work on the #qldfloods and beyond, I participated in a pretty feisty roundtable discussion on the broad topic of social media. It was fascinating to get some insights into how social media policy is evolving within all kinds of Australian organisations, and how various actors are attempting to balance the potentially useful role of social media in crises and risk management (as well as for community awareness and engagement more broadly), with the riskiness of social media’s rapidity, connectivity and personalisation of public communication.

Slides from my presentation are below: