CRISIS COMMUNICATION DURING HEALTH CRISES: THE CASE OF CANADIAN OFFICIALS’ SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

To effectively manage a health crisis, citizens need to have shared Situational Awareness (SA) of the crisis. This study proposes that the public draws upon shared mental models of the crisis to achieve shared SA. Declarative, procedural, and strategic knowledge bases comprise the essential aspects of shared mental models of mission-critical situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, public officials must provide a constant flow of crisis declarative, procedural, and strategic knowledge on social media. This study investigates Canadian officials’ presence on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing a dataset of 213,089 Canadian officials’ tweets shows that their presence was either for health crisis management (73.26%) or crisis-related topics (46.66%). Declarative (72.03%), procedural (38.1%), and strategic knowledge (30.18%) comprised 96% of the health crisis management tweets. This study informs research and practice by analyzing the essential role of knowledge types in creating a shared SA in managing health crises

112.social: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Crisis App for Bidirectional Communication between Emergency Services and Citizens

Emergencies threaten human lives and overall societal continuity, whether or not the crises and disasters are induced by nature, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, or by human beings, such as accidents, terror attacks and uprisings. In such situations, not only do citizens demand information about the damage and safe behaviour, but emergency services also require high quality information to improve situational awareness. For this purpose, there are currently two kinds of apps available: General-purpose apps, such as Facebook Safety Check or Twitter Alerts, already integrate safety features. Specific crisis apps, such as KATWARN in Germany or FEMA in the US, provide information on how to behave before, during and after emergencies, and capabilities for reporting incidents or receiving disaster warnings. In this paper, we analyse authorities’ and citizens’ information demands and features of crisis apps. Moreover, we present the concept, implementation and evaluation of a crisis app for incident reporting and bidirectional communication between authorities and citizens. Using the app, citizens may (1) report incidents by providing a category, description, location and multimedia files and (2) receive broadcasts and responses from authorities. Finally, we outline features, requirements and contextual factors for incident reporting and bidirectional communication via mobile app

Information systems for crisis response and management:The EU data protection regulation, privacy by design and certification

With technological development in crisis management reaching a point at which there is wide-scale aggregation of data, including social media, there is a need to focus strongly upon the position of end users in order to uphold data protection principles. Recent wide-ranging European Union legal reforms, finalized in 2016, have enshrined the concept of data protection by design and paved the way for certification schemes to validate compliance. There is a need for those involved with the practical development of information systems for crisis management to understand these new developments and determine their practical implications. This paper presents a critical analysis of the reforms, focusing on the interplay between the law and technological design and predicting their impact on crisis management system development

Information propagation in social networks during crises: A structural framework

In crisis situations like riots, earthquakes, storms, etc. information plays a central role in the process of organizing interventions and decision making. Due to their increasing use during crises, social media (SM) represents a valuable source of information that could help obtain a full picture of people needs and concerns. In this chapter, we highlight the importance of SM networks in crisis management (CM) to show how information is propagated through. The chapter also summarizes the current state of research related to information propagation in SMnetworks during crises. In particular three classes of information propagation research categories are identified: network analysis and community detection, role and topic-oriented information propagation, and infrastructure-oriented information propagation. The chapter describes an analysis framework that deals with structural information propagation for crisismanagement purposes. Structural propagation is about broadcasting specific information obtained from social media networks to targeted sinks/receivers/hubs like emergency agencies, police department, fire department, etc. Specifically, the framework aims to identify the discussion topics, known as sub-events, related to a crisis (event) from SM contents. A brief description of techniques used to detect topics and the way those topics can be used in structural information propagation are presented

Microblogging during the European Floods 2013: What Twitter May Contribute in German Emergencies

Social media is becoming more and more important in crisis management. However its analysis by emergency services still bears unaddressed challenges and the majority of studies focus on the use of social media in the USA. In this paper German tweets of the European Flood 2013 are therefore captured and analyzed using descriptive statistics, qualitative data coding, and computational algorithms. Our work illustrates that this event provided sufficient German traffic and geo-locations as well as enough original data (not derivative). However, up-to-date Named Entity Recognizer (NER) with German classifier could not recognize German rivers and highways satisfactorily. Furthermore our analysis revealed pragmatic (linguistic) barriers resulting from irony, wordplay, and ambiguity, as well as in retweet-behavior. To ease the analysis of data we suggest a retweet ratio, which is illustrated to be higher with important tweets and may help selecting tweets for mining. We argue that existing software has to be adapted and improved for German language characteristics, also to detect markedness, seriousness and trut

Aiding first incident responders using a decision support system based on live drone feeds

In case of a dangerous incident, such as a fire, a collision or an earthquake, a lot of contextual data is available for the first incident responders when handling this incident. Based on this data, a commander on scene or dispatchers need to make split-second decisions to get a good overview on the situation and to avoid further injuries or risks. Therefore, we propose a decision support system that can aid incident responders on scene in prioritizing the rescue efforts that need to be addressed. The system collects relevant data from a custom designed drone by detecting objects such as firefighters, fires, victims, fuel tanks, etc. The drone autonomously observes the incident area, and based on the detected information it proposes a prioritized based action list on e.g. urgency or danger to incident responders

Communication between Power Blackout and Mobile Network Overload

In cases of power outages the communication of organizations responsible for recovery work (emergency services, public administration, energy network operators) to the public poses several challenges, primarily the breakdowns of many communication infrastructures and therefore the limitations of the use of classical communication media. This paper surveys technical concepts to support crisis communication during blackouts. Therefore it first investigates the perception and information demands of citizens and communication infrastructures in different scenarios. Furthermore, it analyzes communication infrastructures and their availability in different scenarios. Finally it proposes ‘BlaCom', an ICT-based concept for blackout communication, which addresses the time span between the occurrence of the energy blackout and the possible overload of the mobile phone network. It combines general information with location-specific and setting-specific information, was implemented as a prototype smartphone application and evaluated with 12 potential end users

European expectations of disaster information provided by critical infrastructure operators

Previous research into social media crisis communication has tended to focus on use by emergency managers rather than other key stakeholder, critical infrastructure (CI) operators. This article adds to the field by empirically investigating public expectations of information provided by CI operators during crisis situations and if CI operators currently meet such expectations. It draws on key themes that emerged from a review of the literature on public expectations of disaster related information shared via social media. Then, it presents the results of an online questionnaire and interview-based study of disaster-vulnerable communities in France, Norway, Portugal and Sweden. Results indicate that members of the public expect CI operators to provide disaster related information via traditional and social media, but not necessarily respond to their queries on social media. Operators appear to meet public expectations of traditional media use, but should expand their current practices to include digital media. Recommendations for CI operators on how to do use social media follow

Modeling uncertain and dynamic casualty health in optimization-based decision support for mass casualty incident response

When designing a decision support program for use in coordinating the response to Mass Casualty Incidents, the modelling of the health of casualties presents a significant challenge. In this paper we propose one such health model, capable of acknowledging both the uncertain and dynamic nature of casualty health. Incorporating this into a larger optimisation model capable of use in real-time and in an online manner, computational experiments examining the effect of errors in health assessment, regular updates of health and delays in communication are reported. Results demonstrate the often significant impact of these factors