The Use of Social Media in Emergency Management by Public Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations: Lessons Learned From Areas Affected by Hurricanes Isaac, Sandy, and Harvey

Natural disasters are increasingly costly for the United States. The literature suggests emergency managers may improve disaster outcomes and enhance disaster resilience by supplementing their official public-communications methods with more bi-directional communication tactics using social media. This study aims to understand how social media is used within the “whole community” of emergency management in areas affected by recent hurricanes. The first research objective examines how social media is used by governmental and non-governmental organizations across the four phases of emergency management (preparedness, response, recovery, mitigation). The second objective is to identify challenges governmental and non-governmental groups have encountered and strategies they recommend addressing these problems. The third objective is to examine how social media was used by disaster responders specifically during the response phase of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. We conducted a survey of 269 organizations in areas affected by Hurricanes Isaac and Sandy in 2012 to address research objectives one and two, and for the third objective, surveyed 64 organizations who contributed to the rescue and response efforts during Hurricane Harvey. The first survey found respondents representing government-related organizations use social media more during the response and the preparedness phases, while non-governmental groups report more social media activity during the recovery phase. This finding suggests that organizations performing primary and secondary roles in emergency management play complementary roles in risk and crisis communication with the public. The results also suggest that the emergency management community primarily uses social media to “push” information to the public through established communication networks and could benefit from additional efforts to “pull” information from their networks. Survey respondents report greatest concern about challenges external to their organizations, with the accuracy of information found on social media to be most concerning. The third research objective finds generally high levels of social media use among Hurricane Harvey responders, but also evidence of technical challenges including an inability to convert web-based communications to dispatchable missions due to limited functionality of their 911 systems. The results of the study provide insights regarding uses, challenges, and strategies to improve social media for the whole community of emergency management

Designing for Collective Intelligence and Community Resilience on Social Networks

The popularity and ubiquity of social networks has enabled a new form of decentralised online collaboration: groups of users gathering around a central theme and working together to solve problems, complete tasks and develop social connections. Groups that display such ‘organic collaboration’ have been shown to solve tasks quicker and more accurately than other methods of crowdsourcing. They can also enable community action and resilience in response to different events, from casual requests to emergency response and crisis management. However, engaging such groups through formal agencies risks disconnect and disengagement by destabilising motivational structures. This paper explores case studies of this henomenon, reviews models of motivation that can help design systems to harness these groups and proposes a framework for lightweight engagement using existing platforms and social networks

Socializing in emergencies—A review of the use of social media in emergency situations

AbstractSocial media tools are integrated in most parts of our daily lives, as citizens, netizens, researchers or emergency responders. Lessons learnt from disasters and emergencies that occurred globally in the last few years have shown that social media tools may serve as an integral and significant component of crisis response. Communication is one of the fundamental tools of emergency management. It becomes crucial when there are dozens of agencies and organizations responding to a disaster. Regardless of the type of emergency, whether a terrorist attack, a hurricane or an earthquake, communication lines may be overloaded and cellular networks overwhelmed as too many people attempt to use them to access information. Social scientists have presented that post-disaster active public participation was largely altruistic, including activities such as search and rescue, first aid treatment, victim evacuation, and on-line help. Social media provides opportunities for engaging citizens in the emergency management by both disseminating information to the public and accessing information from them. During emergency events, individuals are exposed to large quantities of information without being aware of their validity or risk of misinformation, but users are usually swift to correct them, thus making the social media “self-regulating”

Embedded Social Science and the British Government COVID-19 Response

The complex and evolving nature of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic poses significant challenges to national and international emergency preparedness and response. Governments must navigate streams of emerging data in real time, synthesising knowledge from diverse sources to inform policy. The UK government drew on experiences from earlier pandemics to bridge perceived gaps between social science research and policy through the secondment of early-career academics as embedded scientists. In this article, we present comparative ethnographic data describing embedded social scientists’ contributions to UK COVID-19 preparedness and response. We find that the liminal position, loose identities, and high degree of autonomy of embedded scientists allowed these individuals to navigate multiple networks to strengthen and legitimise the role of social science within policy debates

Network Effects on Learning during Disasters: The Case of Australian Bushfires

Understanding factors that enhance or diminish learning levels of individuals and teams is significant for achieving both individual (low level) and organisational (high level) goals. In this study, the effect of social network factors at all levels of analysis (actor level, dyadic level and network level) on learning attitudes of emergency personnel in emergency events is investigated. Based on social network concepts of structural holes and strength of weak ties, and the social influence model of learning, a conceptual model is developed. To test and validate the model, data was collected from the transcripts of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission reports in conjunction with the 2008 Australian Inter-Service Incident Management System (AIIMS) survey. Secondly, network measures were applied for exploring the association with learning from a sample of people working within Incident Management Teams, combat roles and coordination centres across Australia and New Zealand. Empirical results suggest that social network factors at all levels of analysis (actor, dyadic and network levels) of emergency personnel play a crucial role in individual and team learning. The contextual implication from the quantitative and qualitative findings of this research is that when approaches for improving the emergency response at an interpersonal level are contemplated, the importance of social structure, position and relations in the networks of emergency personnel needs to be considered carefully as part of the overall individual and organisation-level goals. With this model of learning-related work activity, based on network connectedness, emergency staff members can strengthen their capacity to be flexible and adaptable. The findings of this study may be appreciated by emergency managers or administrators for developing an emergency practice culture to optimise individual and team learning and adaptability within an emergency management context

Examining Inter-organizational Network During Emergency Response of Gunungkidul Drought 2019

Drought is a disaster that often occurs in Gunungkidul Regency, where the condition was exacerbated by the occurrence of a long drought in 2019 (BMKG, 2019). Beside climatic and geological factors, drought is also caused by the involvement of multi-stakeholders, including local governments in managing drought emergency conditions. This research presented a case study on drought disaster management in Gunungkidul in 2019, where qualitative and social network analysis research methods were applied. Social network analysis was used to examine the central actors of the organizations involved in drought management and the role of networks in these levels of government. Meanwhile, qualitative methods were used to explore the factors influencing the network. The results show that the central actors during the emergency response were BPBD, PMI, and PDAM of Gunungkidul Regency. Meanwhile, the role of inter-organizational networks at the district level had been optimized by performing command and control over developments in the situation, involving community organizations and business institutions. Furthermore, on the factors affecting the network, everything had been maximized except two factors that were still lacking, including partnerships and the use of sophisticated information technology

Collective Dynamics of Hierarchical Networks

In an increasingly complex, mobile and interconnected world, we face growing threats of disasters, whether by chance or deliberately. Disruption of coordinated response and recovery efforts due to organizational, technical, procedural, random or deliberate attack could result in the risk of massive loss of life. This requires urgent action to explore the development of optimal information-sharing environments for promoting collective disaster response and preparedness using multijurisdictional hierarchical networks. Innovative approaches to information flow modeling and analysis for dealing with challenges of coordinating across multi layered agency structures as well as development of early warnings through social systems using social media analytics may be pivotal to timely 2 responses to dealing with large scale disasters where response strategies need to be viewed as a shared responsibility. How do facilitate the development of collective disaster response in a multijurisdictional setting? How do we develop and test the level and effectiveness of shared multijurisdictional hierarchical networks for improved preparedness and response? What is the role of multi layered training and exercises in building the shared learning space for collective disaster preparedness and response? The aim of this is therefore to determine factors that may be responsible for affecting disaster response. It is shown here that changes to the interconnectedness of nodes in the network may have implications on the potential to preparedness and response. In this study, theory behind social network analysis is applied to a large-scale inter-organisational Disaster Response Network (DRN) for exploring correlation between network interconnectedness and response. We discover that the leadership and involvement displayed by organisations in multijurisdictional emergency response is not equal, and hypothesise the existence of a loose tiered structure that guides how interconnected an organisation should be. A model is presented as a theoretical means to confront the issues of disaster response. To test our hypotheses, we investigate survey data from state law enforcement, state emergency services and local law enforcement by performing agency-based (macro) and cross-agency (micro) analysis to identify attributes of each network and response. Results suggest that there is a positive correlation between network connectedness and potential to effective response as well as the concept of tiers within DRN may exist which can be characterized by the sub-network that an organisation associates with.preprin

Activating Volunteers for Statewide COVID-19 Pandemic Response

Extension is known for facilitating local networks and having the capacity to organize and mobilize volunteers. These assets, critically important in crises and emergency situations, were drawn on to support Tennessee\u27s response to health care worker and community needs early in the coronavirus pandemic. Using local networks, we rapidly activated a statewide volunteer workforce to address potential shortages of cloth face masks before federal agencies recommended their widespread public use. We share social media communication strategies and a timeline of key events and acknowledge challenges we encountered in moving forward in an environment of inconsistent and evolving guidelines. Our actions may be applicable to addressing ongoing community needs as the pandemic persists and new circumstances arise