Whenever live coverage meets high tech, on-the-fly learning is par for the course. So this week in San Antonio, Texas, the staff of NOWcastSA wasn't deterred when their initial plans for live crowdsourced coverage of a huge community event hit major technical glitches. Here's how they quickly jumped to plan B, and beyond, until they found a combination of tools and processes that worked.

"Don't sweat it if you're up to plan D!" laughed managing director Charlotte-Anne Lucas. "Stay creative and focused. There are always options."

Given the city's long, rich civil rights history, San Antonio's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day march is a huge community event, attracting over 100,000 people. And everyone brings a cell phone. So NOWcastSA set out to collect crowdsourced coverage of the march, submitted from attendees' cell phones -- and the deliver that content in a mobile-friendly way while the march was still proceeding.

Handling photos, building slideshows

The original plan was for community members to use multimedia messaging or e-mail to submit their event photos to NOWcastSA's Flickr account -- and that's what they publicized in advance, so Flickr had to be part of the plan. Staff would then immediately sort through these photos to create a curated slideshow.

But there was an obstacle to submissions: the Flickr-assigned e-mail address for sending photos to NOWcastSA's account was pretty unwieldy and ugly. "No one would have wanted to type that into their phone," Lucas noted. But NOWcastSA's Clayton Price came up with the idea to create a short, memorable, easy-to-spell address under the NOWcastSA.org domain, which forwarded to the ugly Flickr address. This strategy worked well. "People used it, plus it carried our branding," said Lucas.

Flickr offers a slideshow-building feature, but NOWcastSA couldn't use it. Flickr's slideshow tool relies on Adobe Flash -- a technology that won't run on many mobile devices.

Realizing this problem, last Friday Lucas hurridley began researching other tools to build slideshows that could be viewed on any smartphone or tablet. Simply Googling around for "mobile friendly slideshows" wasn't getting her anywhere. Then she remembered that HTML5 is a key tool to deliver multimedia to mobile devices. Changing her search tactic to "HTML5 slideshow tools" led her to a couple of options.

The first, which greatly excited Lucas, was Hype -- a software package that creates HTML5 web content packages, including mobile-friendly and embeddable slideshows. ($59, free trial available.) When she posted on Twitter about this tool, staff from Tumult (the company that makes Hype) immediately engaged her and helped her figure out how it might be used for her project. It looked more complex than NOWcastSA needed in order to cover the march, but Lucas wanted to give it a shot.

"As it turned out, Hype was a bit too cumbersome for this particular project -- we couldn't export photos from our Flickr account directly into it, for one thing," said Lucas "But it's a great tool and we plan to use it in the future."

They ended up switching to a simpler tool that NOWcast's development director Amanda Evrard discovered last weekend: SlideMyPics, a free simple web application that directly imports photos from Flickr and outputs HTML5-based slideshows easy to navigate via a touchscreen. "It was zero learning curve," said Lucas.

To start, NOWcastSA seeded the slideshow with some of their own staff photos. Then during the march, as contributed photos came in, Evrard updated and and seamlessly republished the slideshow about six times. NOWcastSA embedded the slideshow on their story page for the march, and used social media to direct traffic to that page. "We couldn't get analytics from the slideshow on SlideMyPics.com, but we could on our own page, so that decision was a little bit of a compromise. But it worked, people were checking it out," said Lucas.

Crowdmapping complications

Another part of NOWcastSA's original event coverage plan was to place contributed geotagged photos on an interactive map of the march, creating a record that would provide the context of place, not just snapshots of moments in time.

To place geotagged photos on a map, NOWcastSA turned to Crowdmap.com, one of the free open-source tools from the Ushahidi platform. They'd successfully used Crowdmap.com before for crowdsourced neighborhood storytelling projects which included photos, video and even historical documents. You can upload photos to Crowdmap.com projects via Ushahidi's mobile apps.

"We wanted people to be able to add photos to our event map straight from their phones, right when they took them at the march -- not just dump them on us after the event and we'd have to move them over, because nobody wants to do that," said Lucas.

That was the plan, anyway.

But as luck would have it, shortly before the march software updates to Ushahidi's mobile apps caused glitches which meant those apps temporarily couldn't not push photos to NOWcastSA's map. This function had been working before the march -- they'd tested it, Lucas said. But when that publishing channel failed in the moment, they decided to let the map wait. "We're going to go back later and add our slideshow to the map," said Lucas. "It'll show up as one event, and we'll place it either at the beginning or the end of the map route. But we'll use it as part of a larger project for storytelling about local civil rights history."

They'll also add to the map several videos from the march (including interviews), positioned at the locations where NOWcastSA video journalist Andrew Delgado shot the footage.

Although the NOWcastSA team was disappointed they couldn't present the map during the event, Lucas gained a greater awareness about how the experience of a major community event reaches forward in time for community members.

"When I worked for newspapers and we did event coverage, it all had to be done that day, before the end of day. By the next day, we'd moved on. But people who attend a big event in their community, they don't have the same attitude. When you look at our analytics, they're still checking our event coverage out days later, discovering new stuff. Just because journalists might think content is late doesn't mean it's too late for the community."

NOWcastSA learned several valuable lessons from this experience, including ideas for how to do more extensive marketing in advance, as well as finding new strategies to transmit opt-in text alerts. Social media support from community members and local businesses and organizations helped drive considerable traffic to their coverage during and after the event. And hopefully, for the next big events (coming up this spring) even the crowdmapping will be working well.

But if some part of the technology chain fails -- and it will -- they'll adapt.