Citizen communications in crisis (original) (raw)
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Finding community through information and communication technology in disaster response
Proceedings of the ACM 2008 conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '08, 2008
Disasters affect not only the welfare of individuals and family groups, but also the well-being of communities, and can serve as a catalyst for innovative uses of information and communication technology (ICT). In this paper, we present evidence of ICT use for re-orientation toward the community and for the production of public goods in the form of information dissemination during disasters. Results from this study of information seeking practices by members of the public during the October 2007 Southern California wildfires suggest that ICT use provides a means for communicating community-relevant information especially when members become geographically dispersed, leveraging and even building community resources in the process. In the presence of pervasive ICT, people are developing new practices for emergency response by using ICT to address problems that arise from information dearth and geographical dispersion. In doing so, they find community by reconnecting with others who share their concern for the locale threatened by the hazard.
Finding Community Through Information and Communication Technology During Disaster Events
2008
Disasters affect not only the welfare of individuals and family groups, but also the well-being of communities, and can serve as a catalyst for innovative uses of information and communication technology (ICT). In this paper, we present evidence of ICT use for re-orientation toward the community and for the production of public goods in the form of information dissemination during disasters. Results from this study of information seeking practices by members of the public during the October 2007 Southern California wildfires suggest that ICT use provides a means for communicating community-relevant information especially when members become geographically dispersed, leveraging and even building community resources in the process. In the presence of pervasive ICT, people are developing new practices for emergency response by using ICT to address problems that arise from information dearth and geographical dispersion. In doing so, they find community by reconnecting with others who share their concern for the locale threatened by the hazard.
Citizens' Communication Habits and Use of ICTs During Crises and Emergencies
Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments, 2014
In this article, citizens' communication habits and use of information and communication technologies during crises and emergencies are discussed from the perspective of community resilience. The topic is approached qualitatively by exploring citizens' perceptions, and the data were gathered by means of focus groups in storm-prone and flood-prone areas in Finland. The results indicate that citizens consider emergency communication to be mostly unidirectional: from authorities to the public. However, because crises are often complex and fast developing, cooperation among response organizations and citizen groups is needed to coproduce safety and in adapting to changing situations. Organizations wanting citizens to participate proactively in emergency management should raise citizens' awareness of the means and possibilities to contribute, because these informants' expectation that authorities would welcome their input was low. Based on the results, public participation could be supported further by credible actors, such as local volunteer organizations.
To make informed decisions about the future of our communications infrastructure in the United States, it is important to have a clear, evidence-based understanding of how the information needs of crisis-affected communities are being addressed. For this chapter, we examine the interplay between traditional “legacy” media and network-enabled Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as “social media,” to explore how they together, and separately, meet the information needs of disaster-affected communities. Our analyses are based upon our empirical research looking at how information was created, shaped, and shared in several recent disasters. We give an extended example of how a specific information need was addressed in 2011 in rural upstate New York, when Hurricane Irene devastated several local communities. In the last week of August 2011, Hurricane Irene struck New York state, followed a week later by Tropical Storm Lee. The combined damage of the two storms became the state’s largest natural disaster and the second most-costly. Of sixty- two New York counties, thirty-eight were declared disaster areas (NY Office of the Governor 2012). We describe several key resources that were important to surfacing and sharing useful, actionable information in the New York’s Catskills region, an area hard-hit by these storms. We find that the interplay between traditional legacy media organizations and a crowd empowered to act through social media is not a simple one. Rather, useful, actionable information comes to light through the complex and not entirely new interplay between these media and the public. Likewise, while the trend among organizations (including regional legacy media) appears to be an increasing reliance on ICTs, evidence suggests that legacy technologies continue to play an important role in the diffusion of information. Further, different communities addressed the same information needs in somewhat different ways, highlighting the importance of fostering infrastructures that enable dynamic and flexible information-sharing structures in disaster- affected communities. This empirical account of how people get actionable information during a disaster illustrates how networked ICTs enable people to produce and share critical information. It highlights the diversity of approaches to meeting an information need that are extant even within the same disaster. This example of successful, yet diverse, problem-solving in rural areas affected by Hurricane Irene raises the question of how policy can support the plurality of approaches enacted by those working within a disaster affected region. The increasing reliance of networked ICTs also raises some questions. As information work within disaster-affected communities becomes increasingly reliant on third-party networked services, the role that those services have in shaping information, as well as practical matters such as remuneration for increased network traffic and the quality of networked infrastructures, become increasingly important considerations.
Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a Networked World
Proceedings of the …, 2007
Serious crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from routine situations, as the field of disaster studies has described over its 100-year history. With increasingly pervasive information and communications technology (ICT) and a changing political arena where terrorism is perceived as a major threat, the attention to crisis is high. Some of these new features of social life have created real change in the sociology of disaster that we are only beginning to understand. However, much of what might seem to be new is not; rather ICT makes some behaviors more visible, in particular first response and altruistic activities. Even so, with each new crisis event, the calls for technological solutions and policy change come fast and furious, often in absence of empirical research. Our lab is establishing an area of sociologically informed research and ICT development in the area of crisis informatics. Here, we report on some of the challenges and findings when conducting empirical study where the subject of attention is disperse, emergent and increasingly expanding through on-line arenas. We specifically consider the challenge of studying citizenside information generation and dissemination activities during the April 16, 2007 crisis at Virginia Tech, which we have investigated both on-site and on-line.
Empowering Crisis Response-Led Citizen Communities
Strategic Management and Leadership for Systems Development in Virtual Spaces
Crisis times are characterized by a dynamically changing and evolving need set that should be evaluated and acted upon with the least amount of latency. Though the established practice of response to rescue and relief operations is largely institutionalized in norms and localized; there is a vast sea of surging goodwill and voluntary involvement that is available globally to be tapped into and channelized for maximum benefit in the initial hours and days of the crisis. This is made possible with the availability of real-time, collaborative communication platforms such as those facilitated by Facebook, Google and Twitter. They enable building and harnessing real-time communities as an amorphous force multiplier to collate, structure, disseminate, follow-through, and close the loop between on-ground and off-ground coordination on information, which aids both rescue as well relief operations of ground response organizations. At times of emergencies, amorphous online communities of citi...
Crowdsourced, Voluntary Collective Action in Disasters
This paper explores how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used for the public across the world to take their crowdsourced, voluntary collective action to effectively address natural disasters and man-made crises in the network age. The ICTs enable individuals to mobilize volunteers across the globe, report crisis situations from the ground, translate reported messages, carry out crisis mapping, and self-organize the coordination of relief resources. Although the ICTs-enabled, voluntary collection action can make a considerable contribution to emergency and crisis management, scholars and practitioners need to consider challenges and risks, including inaccuracy, bias, privacy and security issues, technological limitations, and burnout of online volunteers.