Xhelp

Abstract

Recent disasters have shown an increase in the significance of social media for both affected citizens and volunteers alike in the coordination of information and organization of relief activities, often independently of and in addition to the official emergency response. Existing research mainly focuses on the way in which individual platforms are used by volunteers in response to disasters. This paper examines the use of social media during the European Floods of 2013 and proposes a novel cross-social-media application for volunteers. Besides comprehensive analysis of volunteer communities, interviews were conducted with "digital volunteers" such as Facebook moderators of disaster-related groups. Based on the challenges identified, we designed and implemented the cross-social-media application "XHELP", which allows information to be both, acquired and distributed cross-media and cross-channel. The evaluation with 20 users leads to further design requirements for applications aiming to support volunteer moderators during disasters.

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

“…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. However, since the focus of their work was on developing a scalable application that can overcome the limitations of the existing tools, the study does not provide insights on how such tools are appropriated in practice during disaster response (Ibid.…”

Role Playing Next Generation 9-1-1: Sensemaking with Social Media in Public-Safety Answering Points

“…Research continues to intensely examine social media data as a source of situational information during emergencies [26,39]. Many studies detail the types of situational information posted on social media during crises [31,35,39], techniques for collecting and analyzing social media data [3,8,15,18,24] and situational information needs among emergency responders and citizens [6,12,14,30]. These studies typically characterize social media data as a rich source for timely and accurate situational information [39].…”

Topics and topical phases in German social media communication during a disaster

“…In the context of crisis informatics, up to now, the dominant view is that structured information extraction for social media needs supervised methods with manually prepared categories (e.g. Palen et al 2010; Starbird and Palen 2010; Starbird and Palen 2012; Vieweg et al 2010; Imran et al 2013; Reuter, Heger and Pipek 2013; Reuter and Schröter 2015; Ramage, Dumais and Liebling 2010 for hybrid approach with partial labelling).…”

“…Qu et al 2011; Starbird and Palen 2011; Starbird and Palen 2012). Especially, systematic research into properties and content of German social media crisis communication has just begun (Fuchs et al 2013; Reuter et al 2015; Backfried, Schmidt and Quirchmayr 2015), and the role of social media for German disaster management still needs to be explored (Reuter and Schröter 2015). Moreover, most of the published social media research is focusing on Twitter with only very few available examples of more extended or systematic comparative approaches (Backfried et al (2015), Kaufhold and Reuter (2016); and our own previous work in Gründer-Fahrer and Schlaf (2015)).…”