Bucket Brigade Keyboard

The Bucket Brigade Keyboard is a special twitter keyboard app for Android smartphones designed to standardize the signaling of common phrases and twitter hashtags used by government agencies, emergency personal, and by communities affected by disasters. It is clear that Twitter's micro-blog format is being adopted by the government and communities as the medium of choice during disasters. The key problem with using Twitter during disasters is the difficulty in communicating effectively with non-standard signals and incomplete or questionable credible information. This mobile app seeks to solve that problem. This app is a standard Android QWERTY Soft Keyboard. Once installed this keyboard is made available for use with any Twitter Android app. The keyboard has a key identified with a red bucket, that when pressed gives users the bucket brigade keyboard. Users can write their tweets using different natural language shortcuts that when pressed input standard signals adopted by researchers and first responders during disasters. The signals were selected based on my own communication and collaboration research and the research from Project Epic and Tweak the Tweet http://epic.cs.colorado.edu/?page_id=11 In a disaster, communication and working together can save lives. Just as a fire bucket brigade fills and passes buckets of water to put out fires, this app allows people to fill and pass buckets of tweets in order to work together during a disaster. Please see recent media coverage of the Bucket Brigade Keyboard App. The story made the frontpage of the newspaper!CU Boulder student's app to help people tweet during disastershttp://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_18995956 This app is open source.