Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2013 Symposium (2014) / Chapter Skim
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Crowds, Crisis, and Convergence: Crowdsourcing in the Context of Disasters--Kate Starbird
Crowds, Crisis, and Convergence: Crowdsourcing in the Context of Disasters--Kate Starbird
Pages 11-16
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From page 11... ...
Residents of affected areas shared first-hand reports of actionable information -- photos of flooded streets, videos of trees falling and houses catching fire, and tweets reporting stranded people. Emergency responders turned to social media to broadcast storm warnings and to quell rumors.
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The latter included the establishment of a Twitter hashtag to share information about open gas stations and a related project by a group of high school students who created and maintained a live "gas map" -- an online map that displayed in real time where gas was available. The role of social media during Sandy's lead-up, impact, and response generated considerable media attention.
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From page 13... ...
Although terms of service and protocols continually change, accessing social media data is often the easiest part of the problem, because many social media platforms provide application programming interfaces for collecting public data. Storing and searching these massive datasets presents a more complex challenge, one addressed in broader conversations about dealing with "big data." Moreover, because the textual content of social media streams is not quite the "natural language" for which traditional natural language processing techniques have been designed and tested, new approaches for computational content analysis are needed.
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From page 14... ...
However, questions remain about how they will sustain committed participation and how they can connect both the products of their work and this new information-processing capacity more broadly to the established work practices of formal responders. One research opportunity lies in understanding the work of digital volunteers and designing tools and platforms to support their efforts -- for example, by developing crowdsourcing solutions that align with the motivations of disaster volunteers, initial altruism that soon becomes augmented by social and reputation "capital." Using the Noise to Find the Signal The collective behavior of the crowd can be leveraged to address informationprocessing challenges.
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From page 15... ...
Along these lines, it will be important to design solutions that both align with the values and motivations of digital volunteers and fit into formal emergency response processes. Conclusion: The Need for Human-Centered Design in the Context of Disaster Events Massive online convergence is now an established feature of crisis events and carries with it great potential for improving outcomes during response efforts -- if the right information can be transmitted to the right people at the right time and in the right form.
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From page 16... ...
Chatter on the Red: What hazards threat reveals about the social life of microblogged information. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Savannah, February.
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