[115691] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Using twitter as an outage notification
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roland Perry)
Sun Jul 5 09:18:15 2009
Date: Sun, 5 Jul 2009 14:16:27 +0100
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Roland Perry <lists@internetpolicyagency.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0907050334130.23511@mail.pirk.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
In article <Pine.LNX.4.64.0907050334130.23511@mail.pirk.com>, Steve Pirk
<orion@pirk.com> writes
>> It's a High School. They don't have a "support desk" (or more than
>>handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope
>>with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they
>>have closed due to bad weather.
>>
>If your resources are that tight, do what our local school district
>did, mandate that all bus schedules will only be available on the web
>site.
The school doesn't have any buses. About 80% of the students walk (the
average distance maybe a little over a mile) and most of the rest get
taken in their parents car.
>Roland, sounds like you should have a few "public service"
>announcements saying that school closures will be delivered via a
>certain twitter username.
That's what my objective is - to build a sturdy enough case for the
school to have a twitter account to use during these events.
>Also send a flyer home with the students.
Only about half of those ever reach home (no-one knows where they end
up, but it's probably the same place as all those lost Biros).
But if the school had a twitter account I'm sure the news would spread
rapidly. Most of the students spend hours online every day, even if the
school doesn't.
>The radio station can pick up the twitter feed like everyone else, and
>announce closures. That is the way a certain group of people are doing
>it in the middle east right now, word gets around and word gets out...
>In your case, the community will know quickly, all from a couple of
>people logging into twitter and sending a few messages. Sounds like a
>simple, ideal solution given your budget constraints.
I hope so.
--
Roland Perry
