Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies

Outlines the challenges of and recommendations for creating an effective interface between humanitarian groups and volunteer and technical communities aggregating, visualizing, and analyzing data on and from affected communities to support relief efforts

Toward a Better Understanding of Complex Emergency Response Systems: An Event-Driven Lens for Integrating Formal and Volunteer-Based, Participatory Emergency Responses

abstract: Traditionally, emergency response is in large part the role and responsibility of formal organizations. Advances in information technology enable amateurs or concerned publics to play a meaningful role in emergency response. Indeed, in recent catastrophic disasters or crises such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2011 Japan earthquake and nuclear crisis, participatory online groups of the general public from both across the globe and the affected areas made significant contributions to the effective response through crowdsourcing vital information and assisting with the allocation of needed resources. Thus, a more integrative lens is needed to understand the responses of various actors to catastrophic crises or disasters by taking into account not only formal organizations with legal responsibilities, but also volunteer-based, participatory groups who actively participate in emergency response. In this dissertation, I first developed an “event-driven” lens for integrating both formal and volunteer-based, participatory emergency responses on the basis of a comprehensive literature review (chapter 1). Then I conducted a deeper analysis of one aspect of the event-driven lens: relationships between participatory online groups and formal organizations in crisis or disaster situations. Specifically, I explored organizational and technical determinants and outcomes of forming such relationships (chapter 2). As a consequence, I found out three determinants (resource dependence, shared understanding, and information technology) and two outcomes (inter-organizational alignment and the effectiveness of coordinated emergency response) of the relationship between participatory online groups and formal organizations and suggested seven hypotheses. Furthermore, I empirically tested these hypotheses, focusing on the 2015 Nepal earthquake case (chapter 3). As a result, I found empirical evidence that supports that shared understanding and information technology improve the development of the relationship between participatory online groups and formal organizations. Moreover, research findings support that the development of the relationship enhances inter-organizational coordination. Lastly, I provide implications for future research (chapter 4). This dissertation is expected to contribute to bridging the disconnect between the emergency management literature and the crisis informatics literature. The theoretical insight from inter-organizational relations (IOR) theory provides another contribution.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Public Administration 201

Translation and interpreting in disaster situations

Disasters negatively affect the health and wellbeing of those who experience them. People communicate with each other to prepare for, respond to, and recover from these effects. In a context of linguistic and cultural diversity, this communication may involve translation and interpreting. Therefore, the study of translation and interpreting in disasters is worthwhile for an understanding of translation and health, especially because the future is likely to bring more disasters that will cut across linguistic, cultural and regional boundaries. This chapter reviews research on language, culture, translation and interpreting in a variety of disaster settings. It explains the potential of translation and interpreting to unlock the knowledge and participation of local communities in disasters, improve their decision-making and risk awareness and achieve equity, justice and dignity. It also reveals common characteristics of translation and interpreting in the disasters studied – including their ad hoc, local, and voluntary nature, as well as the importance of cultural issues – and recommends future avenues for research

Developing a Framework for Stigmergic Human Collaboration with Technology Tools: Cases in Emergency Response

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and geographic information systems (GIS), have become a transformational force in emergency response. Social media enables ad hoc collaboration, providing timely, useful information dissemination and sharing, and helping to overcome limitations of time and place. Geographic information systems increase the level of situation awareness, serving geospatial data using interactive maps, animations, and computer generated imagery derived from sophisticated global remote sensing systems. Digital workspaces bring these technologies together and contribute to meeting ad hoc and formal emergency response challenges through their affordances of situation awareness and mass collaboration. Distributed ICTs that enable ad hoc emergency response via digital workspaces have arguably made traditional top-down system deployments less relevant in certain situations, including emergency response (Merrill, 2009; Heylighen, 2007a, b). Heylighen (2014, 2007a, b) theorizes that human cognitive stigmergy explains some self-organizing characteristics of ad hoc systems. Elliott (2007) identifies cognitive stigmergy as a factor in mass collaborations supported by digital workspaces. Stigmergy, a term from biology, refers to the phenomenon of self-organizing systems with agents that coordinate via perceived changes in the environment rather than direct communication. In the present research, ad hoc emergency response is examined through the lens of human cognitive stigmergy. The basic assertion is that ICTs and stigmergy together make possible highly effective ad hoc collaborations in circumstances where more typical collaborative methods break down. The research is organized into three essays: an in-depth analysis of the development and deployment of the Ushahidi emergency response software platform, a comparison of the emergency response ICTs used for emergency response during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and a process model developed from the case studies and relevant academic literature is described

Management and training of linguistic volunteers: a case study of translation at Cochrane Germany

Cochrane is a global, non-profit organisation that synthesizes health-related research evidence. It established a translation strategy in 2014 to increase the significance of its information beyond the English-speaking world. Under the strategy, translation at Cochrane is achieved mostly through the efforts of linguistic volunteers. Translation in crisis settings, too, relies on the work of volunteers; however, appropriate ways to manage and train these volunteers are unclear. We carried out a study of the case of translation at one part of Cochrane, Cochrane Germany, to learn about the management and training of linguistic volunteers there and in Cochrane more broadly. Thematic analysis of data gathered by the researcher during a two-month secondment to the offices of Cochrane Germany– including data from formal interviews, informal meetings, field notes, a reflective journal, and a large corpus of grey literature – generated three main themes. The themes relate to appropriate conceptualisations of linguistic volunteers, project management in the assurance of quality volunteer work, and feedback as a form of volunteer training. Recommendations are made to apply these lessons learned to future work on crisis translation and for possible improvements to linguistic volunteer management and training at Cochrane

Translation facilitates comprehension of health-related crisis information: Kenya as an example

This paper examines the relationship between translation and comprehension when communicating health-related information during a crisis. It tests comprehension levels among a population of rural and urban Kenyans of health-related crisis communication presented to them in an English source text and a Kiswahili target text. These data were gathered in Kenya in collaboration with a non-profit organisation, Translators without Borders, and the overarching aim of the project was to assess empirically the potential impact of translation on comprehension of health-crisis content. Findings indicate that English is not a suitable medium for the transfer of important health-related information among the cohort of participants in this study, despite English being an official language of Kenya. In contrast, Kiswahili, also an official language, seems to function well. As a result, a need for translation into Kiswahili in this context has been empirically shown. It was further found that written modes of communication are not necessarily the most appropriate modes for the dissemination of health-related crisis information among this cohort. This presents interesting challenges for governments, crisis response agencies, and translators alike, and these challenges are discussed

Web 2.0 Broker: A standards-based service for spatio-temporal search of crowd-sourced information

Recent trends in information technology show that citizens are increasingly willing to share information using tools provided by Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing platforms to describe events that may have social impact. This is fuelled by the proliferation of location-aware devices such as smartphones and tablets; users are able to share information in these crowdsourcing platforms directly from the field at real time, augmenting this information with its location. Afterwards, to retrieve this information, users must deal with the different search mechanisms provided by the each Web 2.0 services. This paper explores how to improve on the interoperability of Web 2.0 services by providing a single service as a unique entry to search over several Web 2.0 services in a single step. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of the Open Geospatial Consortium's OpenSearch Geospatial and Time specification as an interface for a service that searches and retrieves information available in crowdsourcing services. We present how this information is valuable in complementing other authoritative information by providing an alternative, contemporary source. We demonstrate the intrinsic interoperability of the system showing the integration of crowd-sourced data in different scenarios

Disaster, Infrastructure and Participatory Knowledge:The Planetary Response Network

There are many challenges involved in online participatory humanitarian response. We evaluate the Planetary Response Network (PRN), a collaboration between researchers, humanitarian organizations, and the online citizen science platform Zooniverse. The PRN uses satellite and aerial image analysis to provide stakeholders with high-level situational awareness during and after humanitarian crises. During past deployments, thousands of online volunteers have compared pre- and post-event satellite images to identify damage to infrastructure and buildings, access blockages, and signs of people in distress. In addition to collectively producing aggregated “heat maps” of features that are shared with responders and decision makers, individual volunteers may also flag novel features directly using integrated community discussion software. The online infrastructure facilitates worldwide participation even for geographically focused disasters; this widespread public participation means that high-value information can be delivered rapidly and uniformly even for large-scale crises. We discuss lessons learned from deployments, place the PRN’s distributed online approach in the context of more localized efforts, and identify future needs for the PRN and similar online crisis-mapping projects. The successes of the PRN demonstrate that effective online crisis mapping is possible on a generalized citizen science platform such as the Zooniverse