Designing for the deluge

Abstract

Social media are a potentially valuable source of situational awareness information during crisis events. Consistently, "digital volunteers" and others are coming together to filter and process this data into usable resources, often coordinating their work within distributed online groups. However, current tools and practices are frequently unable to keep up with the speed and volume of incoming data during large events. Through contextual interviews with emergency response professionals and digital volunteers, this research examines the ad hoc, collaborative practices that have emerged to help process this data and outlines strategies for supporting and leveraging these efforts in future designs. We argue for solutions that align with current group values, work practices, volunteer motivations, and organizational structures, but also allow these groups to increase the scale and efficiency of their operations.

Managing Uncertainty

“…For instance, although citizen-reported data on Twitter is a potential data source for emergency responders [62], the data are so abundant that they require intense information processing operations such as filtering and extracting [34]. Emergency response professionals and digital volunteers have to collaboratively filter and process social media data into usable resources during crisis events [12], which can be time and resource intensive.…”

Designing for Helpers: Identifying new design opportunities for digital volunteerism

“…The Australian Bureau of Statistics suggested this may be due to the rise of informal volunteering aided by digital solutions (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017). Online digital platforms have transformed volunteerism (Liu, Harrison, Lai, Chikoto, & Jones-Lungo, 2016) in a range of contexts, such as natural disaster and crisis management (Cobb et al, 2014), collaborative online content creation on platforms such as Wikipedia (Kuznetsov, 2006), and hotlines which are considered 'emotional band aids' for individuals in distress (Gilat & Latzer, 2016). Organisations such as United Nations Volunteers have online platforms to help people volunteer their desired skills for various charitable projects all around the world (www.…”

Harnessing social and collaborative tools in digital disaster response work: Implications for design and practice

“…Earlier studies related to this field assessed existing platforms and tools and thereby developed alternative ones. Some of these studies developed platforms that can support the activities of volunteers in tracking, organising, visualising and reporting actionable information (Cobb et al, 2014;Gupta et al, 2014). Reuter et al (2015) work examined the use of existing social media tools, platforms and approaches among volunteer communities to understand the challenges associated with their use in crisis management.…”

“…For example, during the 2007 Southern California wildfires a study revealed how users that were geographically dispersed leveraged ICT to build community resources and find community-specific information (Shklovski, Palen and Sutton, 2008). As for studies that examine the appropriation of tools by the established groups, their focus tended to revolve around highlighting the type of tools without emphasizing on how their use enabled or constrained disaster response (Starbird and Palen, 2013;Cobb et al, 2014).…”