Another Icelandic volcano has blown its top and, as you might expect, the media has gone batshit. Even otherwise commendable publications like Nature have lost their heads and are calling Grímsvötn “the new Eyjafjallajökull” (hint: it’s completely different). So here’s a quick look at the key information sources you need to understand what’s going on.

Firstly, let’s just talk about pronunciation. Whereas I could understand the reluctance to attempt Eyjafjallajökull, even though it’s not that hard once you’re got your tongue round it, Grímsvötn is much easier. An Icelandic friend says the í is like the ‘ea’ in ‘eating’ and ö is a bit like the e in ‘the’ or the u in ‘duh’ so basically a bit of a schwa. Repeat after me, then: Greamsvuhtn. Easy. Yet despite it being a relatively simple name to pronounce, at least one BBC news presenter bottled it and said something like “A volcano in Iceland” and, instead of tackling Eyjafjallajökull said, “Another volcano in Iceland”… Wimp.

Right, so, horses’ mouths. There are plenty of them, so there’s no excuse for asking the Independent’s travel editor for comment (BBC, I’m lookin’ at you again!), who frankly probably knows jack shit about volcanos. Your key sources for Icelandic eruptions are:

1. The Icelandic Met Office
The IMO provides so much data that it’s hard to see why so many news orgs ignore it. You don’t get much closer to the horse’s mouth than this and, shock-horror, they speak English! Good lord, who’d’ve thunk it. Key pages on the IMO website:

• News: Not updated very often, but still an important source
• Updates: Updated more regularly, more useful info and links
• Earthquakes: Last 48 hours worth of earthquakes. It’d be awesome if someone captured this and made a nice visualisation. And if you’re missing data, just email and ask them – they’re very nice, as I found out last year when they sent me the archival data for Eyjafjallajökull.

The IMO have a lot more data, such as tremor, inflation, and seismic moment, but it will take an expert to interpret that for you.

2. The VAAC
The Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre is run by the UK Met Office and provides maps of the ash cloud forecasts, which it updates regularly. Key links:

• List of Volcanic Ash Advisory Graphics, or VAGs: These graphics are really useful, but they take a bit of interpreting.

If you look at the full size version of this, you’ll see more clearly that there are three coloured lines: The blue line is labeled FL350/FL550, the green line is FL200/FL350 and the red line is SCF/FL200. The blue line is the highest part of the ash cloud between FL350 and FL550, i.e. between 35,000 and 55,000 feet. FL means “flight level” and the number is how many hundreds of feet above ground level you’re looking at. The green line is between 20,000 and 35,000 ft, which is about where jets cruise (at 33,000 ft), and the red line is between surface and 20,000 ft. VAGs are produced regularly and include four forecasts at 6 hour intervals.

The thing to remember about these VAGs is that they are forecasts based on current volcanic activity and wind forecasts, so they can and do change.

3. Regulators & air traffic control
At this stage, I’d love to say that the regulators and air traffic control bodies are a great source of info, but they’re not. That’s not going to stop me giving you their links, though.

• UK Civil Aviation Authority. They also have a Twitter account, but haven’t yet got to grips with the idea of giving people useful information.
• NATS: The National Air Traffic Services are giving regular updates, but it’s not particularly detailed. I’m pretty sure that the now ‘unofficial’ Twitter account was official this time last year, but either way, NATS should sort out their Twitter presence.
• EuroControl: The EU air traffic control, also on Twitter, but doing a slightly better job of it.

I would like someone to slap the CAA, NATS and to some extent Eurocontrol round the chops and insist that they get their online acts together. They may think they have something better to do than communicate with the public, but frankly, I can’t think what it might be. At times like this, we need informed voices from the organisations making and implementing policy decisions to be communicating directly with the public, to counteract the uninformed nonsense we’re fed by our media. Right now, it’s just one great big mess of fail and it’s very disappointing. If any one of you organisations get in touch with me, I’ll go so far as to give you a discount just to see you actually start to engage properly.

4. Erik Klemetti
Frankly, Erik’s work on the Eruptions blog, gathering links and keeping us up to date with what’s happening, blows all the official sources out of the water. Erik has created an awesome community of  people who are constantly on the look out for news and information and sharing it in the comments and, from that smorgasbord, he picks the best links for his posts and provides an expert view on what’s happening as well as some highly accessible explanations. This, to be honest, is the kind of stuff we should be seeing from the UK Met Office, the CAA, NATS and Eurocontrol, not to mention the media.

5. FlightRadar24
Always a fascinating site, FlightRadar24 has now added an ‘Ash Layer’ which superimposes the current forecasts on to their radar map of all the planes currently in the air. Well worth a peek.

6. Mila
Mila have a number of webcams up around Iceland. Currently there’s one working webcam trained on Grímsvötn, and although the picture’s a bit wobbly, when the sun’s up you can clearly see what’s going on. Or not going on: Right now, there’s no plume, but that can of course change at a moment’s notice.

So, that gives you a bunch of sources to check when you want to know what’s going on and you can’t find any actual information in the media. And if you’re like me, you’re still left with a question: What’s going to happen with Grímsvötn and its ash cloud? It’s impossible to predict precisely, but we do know that the ash is heavier and coarser than Eyjafjallajökull’s. We also know that the weather patterns are not the same, and that the eruption is unlikely to go on for as long. So we are probably not looking at a replication of Eyjafjallajökull’s disruption. (“Probably” means that nature can still confound the most sensible of predictions!)

All that said, Iceland is volcanically a highly active country and the lull in activity we’ve seen throughout the history of aviation is not something we should be taking for granted. I wouldn’t panic, though. But nor would I believe everything I read in the media.

I read Highs and Lows of “Post Mortem” Collaboration Between Frontline, ProPublica, NPR, by Carrie Lozano over on Mediashift with interest, not least because collaboration has been a specialty of mine for many years now. Ever since I first started working with social media over seven years ago I have focused on collaboration, so a project that marries collaboration and journalism is of course going to pique my interest.

This piece, first in a series by Lozano, sets the scene, but doesn’t go into any detail about how journalists from Frontline, ProPublica and NPR actually got down to the day-to-day nitty gritty. That’s what I’m really interested in, because the collaboration tools available today make working together really easy, if – and only if – people are willing to learn and adjust the way that they communicate.

There are basically two types of collaboration.

Asynchronous collaboration:

• The actions of the collaborators are spread out over time 
• Materials are gathered or created and made available to the other team members who access them whenever they wish to
• Collaborators can be spread out over different time zones
• Conversations can occur slowly as there can be a delay before each participant is able to reply
• Tools include: wikis, blogs, microconversation tools (i.e. Twitter-like tools), Google Documents, file sharing services like Dropbox

Synchronous (or nearly synchronous) collaboration:

• The actions of the collaborators are taken in concert
• Materials are created together, in real time, either by simultaneous editing or by taking turns in a timely fashion
• Collaborators are usually in overlapping timezones, even if they are not physically in the same location 
• Conversations happen smoothly as collaborators can response almost instantly
• Tools include: instant messenger, chat, Google Documents, microconversation tools

The trick is in knowing what kind of collaboration you need and how to swap seamlessly between modes as required. A lot of people who don’t understand collaboration wind up using email as their primary tool, despite email being very badly suited for the work. If you’re going to collaborate with other reporters, you must set up your collaboration systems and ensure that everyone is familiar about what to use, when and how, before your project truly kicks off.

Lozano says:

there’s a learning curve to working this way as basic issues pose challenges, from how to communicate to how to share information to how to simultaneously report for different platforms. Trying to understand how it all works can be confusing, even with a front-row view, so imagine what it’s like when you’re truly in it.

Indeed. You can’t change your workflow in the middle of a big project: trying to do so will cause problems because people are focused on their work, not on their methodology. So you have to sort out ahead of time how people are going to share their research, their notes, their files, their ideas, their rough drafters and their final copy. And you need to make sure people actually use those tools, rather than clinging to familiar ways of working.

“Chaos is the ultimate form of investigative reporting,” Stephen Engelberg, managing editor of ProPublica, told me in the midst of “Post Mortem.” “You have to acknowledge that inefficiency is part of the process.” He was explaining the vicissitudes of an investigative piece, where a story can take unexpected turns all the way down to the wire. Joint reporting is not so different.

Collaboration can cause issues if people are unclear on the tools and how to use them, but social collaboration tools can and do create new efficiencies, despite projects going in unexpected directions. If everyone, for example, shares their research and keeps an eye on what others are finding, then that can save a lot of duplicated effort. Understanding what everyone else in your team is doing and how to reduce duplication is a key part of collaboration. It’s not just about doing your own thing and letting others follow on behind, but about considering how your work fits in with other people’s, and how you can all save each other a bit of time.

You also have to teach people how to work inside the collaboration tools, so that the act of writing/researching/planning becomes a de facto act of collaboration, rather than making collaboration an add-on that people do after they’ve finished their final draft. I have worked on a number of ‘open’ projects, where clients can see my notes, research and drafts in all their states of disrepair, and it’s a very different way of working. Emotionally, it’s quite hard because if you’re used to handing over only your final draft, you can feel quite vulnerable when someone can see your messy first draft, but it’s well worth it as early feedback is easier to incorporate.

At the most basic level, think about the logistics. With “Post Mortem” it was often a struggle to get everyone in the same room. At times, there would be 15 busy, bicoastal people on a conference call. It was always a juggle keeping everyone in the loop, but with that many people, I’m certain there were some who wouldn’t have minded being excluded.

Meetings and conference calls are essential to any collaborative project, but they should be reserved for discussion and decision making, and should not be used for updates. Keeping people in the loop should be done online, via wikis, blogs, and other such tools, all of which can be kept confidential. (Remember: your work blog does not have to be public!)

I have had many clients who have found that using a wiki to give people updates, set the agenda, and disseminate notes from calls and meetings cut the length of those calls and meetings by at least half. And let’s face it, there’s nothing more tedious than sitting on a call waiting for your turn to bore everyone to death with what you’ve achieved that week! But you do have to think about these processes ahead of time and ensure everyone is in the habit of adding their update and reading everyone else’s before the call. Once people realise that doing so cuts down the tedium, however, most are happy with the new process.

I shall be interested to learn more about this journalist collaboration, the tools they used and how they managed the processes of sharing information. But there’s one thing that all journalistic organisations can and must learn right now:

People outside of your organisation and industry already know a lot about collaboration: asking their advice will save you some pain.

I often worry that the industry is so convinced it is special that it needlessly eschews external expertise, instead preferring to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. You can see this in the continual re-examination of the use of blogs in journalism, despite the fact that we’ve been having that discussion for the best part of the last decade and have pretty much got it figured out. To paraphrase William Gibson, the future is here, it’s just being ignored by half the industry.

Indeed, if there’s one key lesson for journalists to learn about collaboration, it’s to ask the experts who’ve been working in this field for years. Having worked on collaboration projects in many diverse sectors, from investment banking to pharmaceuticals to PR to built environment to science to media, I can promise you that journalists are no different to anyone else. Humans are reassuringly similar no matter what they do, so the lessons learnt about collaboration in pharma are just as applicable to journalism as anything else.

I hope that the exploration of collaborative journalism between Frontline, ProPublica and NPR will throw up some interesting and previously unknown lessons. But I fear that many of their problems will have been be ones they could have avoided with the right preparation. However, we shall have to wait and see!