Why I Retweet? Exploring User’s Perspective on Decision-Making of Information Spreading during Disasters

The extensive use of social media during disasters raises an important issue concerning use of social media to spread information, including misinformation. This study explores the underlying behavioral context of disaster information sharing by Twitter users. We conducted a web survey with 999 respondents in Japan to determine what makes people retweet disaster information in disaster situations. As a result of factor analysis, four factors were identified from 36 questions, namely: 1) Willingness to provide relevant and updated information because the information is believable, 2) Want people to know the information they perceive as important, 3) Retweeter subjective feelings and interests, and 4) Want to get feedback and alert other people. The results suggest that two of the factors influenced different groups of people in the community differently; however, everybody can play their role to reduce the negative impact of social media used for future disaster. Based on the findings, we discuss practical and design implications of social media use during disasters

Konzept und Evaluation einer Facebook-Applikation zur crossmedialen Selbstorganisation freiwilliger Helfer

Das mitteleuropäische Hochwasser 2013 sorgte für große Schäden in weiten Teilen Deutschlands. Währenddessen und in der anschließenden Wiederherstellungsphase koordinierten betroffene und nicht betroffene Bürger ihre Hilfsaktivitäten nicht nur vor Ort, sondern auch in sozialen Medien wie Twitter, Facebook und mit Tools wie Google Maps. Basierend auf einer Vorstudie zu den Aktivitäten in Twitter und Facebook sowie Interviews mit „Digital Volunteers“ (hier: Gründer und Moderatoren von Facebook-Gruppen zum Hochwasser) stellt dieser Beitrag eine als Facebook-App realisierte crossmediale Applikation zur gruppen- und plattformübergreifenden Informationsbeschaffung und -Veröffentlichung vor, die der (Selbst-)Koordination ungebundener Helfer dienen soll. Diese wurde mit 20 Nutzern qualitativ evaluiert und zeigt Implikationen für die technische Unterstützung der Partizipation Freiwilliger in Katastrophenlagen auf

Konzept und Evaluation einer Facebook-Applikation zur crossmedialen Selbstorganisation freiwilliger Helfer

Das mitteleuropäische Hochwasser 2013 sorgte für große Schäden in weiten Teilen Deutschlands. Währenddessen und in der anschließenden Wiederherstellungsphase koordinierten betroffene und nicht betroffene Bürger ihre Hilfsaktivitäten nicht nur vor Ort, sondern auch in sozialen Medien wie Twitter, Facebook und mit Tools wie Google Maps. Basierend auf einer Vorstudie zu den Aktivitäten in Twitter und Facebook sowie Interviews mit „Digital Volunteers“ (hier: Gründer und Moderatoren von Facebook-Gruppen zum Hochwasser) stellt dieser Beitrag eine als Facebook-App realisierte crossmediale Applikation zur gruppen- und plattformübergreifenden Informationsbeschaffung und -Veröffentlichung vor, die der (Selbst-)Koordination ungebundener Helfer dienen soll. Diese wurde mit 20 Nutzern qualitativ evaluiert und zeigt Implikationen für die technische Unterstützung der Partizipation Freiwilliger in Katastrophenlagen auf

Redes sociales online y emergencias sociales.

Política de acceso abierto tomada de: http://biblioteca.cchs.csic.es/registro_buscareditoriales.php?id=285Las redes sociales online ofrecen una rica fuente de información en tiempo real sobre lo que está pasando, especialmente valiosa durante emergencias sociales. Las distintas autoridades, las organizaciones y los trabajadores sociales que atienden estas emergencias están incorporando estos medios para comprender mejor el impacto de los peligros y responder antes las emergencias de manera oportuna. En este capítulo, analizamos la relevancia de las redes sociales online en los casos de emergencias, prestando especial atención a algunos casos relevantes de Twitter durante emergencias sociales. Analizamos tres casos de emergencias sociales, relacionados con una crisis humanitaria, un desastre natural y un ataque terrorista. Se muestra cómo se pueden utilizar técnicas de extracción de datos, de análisis de contenido, incluidos la detección, filtrado y la clasificación de tweets, el agrupamiento, la detección de comunidades y de interlocutores influyentes (influencers) para analizar la situación de Twitter

Social Media and Emergency Services?: Interview Study on Current and Potential Use in 7 European Countries

Social media is much just used for private as well as business purposes, obviously, also during emergencies. Emergency services are often confronted with the amount of information from social media and might consider using them – or not using them. This article highlights the perception of emergency services on social media during emergencies. Within their European research project EMERGENT, the authors therefore conducted an interview study with emergency service staff (N=11) from seven European countries and eight different cities. Their results highlight the current and potential use of social media, the emergency service's participation in research on social media as well as current challenges, benefits and future plans

Social Media-Based Crisis Communication: Analysis of Twitter Data from Local Agencies During Hurricane Irma

As social media platforms have become vital means of communications, it has become imperative for emergency managers and policy makers to understand how people are interacting with different agencies on these platforms for enhancing community response coordination during disasters. Although many public agencies have already adopted social media platforms for crisis communication purposes, empirical evidence on whether and how these agencies are effectively engaged on these platforms is lacking. This research aims to examine crisis communication activities of a variety of agencies on Twitter in response to Hurricane Irma in 2017. In this study, we analyzed 13,353 hurricane-related tweets posted by the local agencies from eight counties in East Central Florida as well as federal, state, and other levels of organizations during the hurricane response period. An engagement metric was applied on these tweets to determine which agencies were most active in disseminating information during Hurricane Irma. The results revealed the most engaged local agencies in Twitter during Hurricane Irma for crisis communications and the Emergency Support Functions (ESFs) associated with them in coordinating disaster response activities. We further investigated Twitter profiles and relevant attributes of these actively engaged agencies, and the contents of the hurricane-related tweets during Hurricane Irma. The study found that local agencies remain active and engaged in Twitter during a disaster compared to other levels of agencies. The ESF representing communication (ESF #2) was one of the most frequent ESFs associated with these active agencies. The results also provided insights on crisis communication performance of these agencies in terms of the three dimensions of social media engagement including popularity, commitment, and virality, which are correlated to the counts of like, reply, and retweet of each post, respectively. The study includes recommendations to local government and partner organizations and emergency managers to improve crisis communication in social media and suggests future research directions

Social Capital and Disasters: A Study of Post-Hurricane Behavior & Attitudes in the United States

This thesis examines what effect disasters have on social capital. Given the ambiguity in the literature on the relationship between social capital and disasters, it is important to study this intersection further. This relationship is analyzed through a quantitative inquiry of Hurricane Irene (2011), Hurricane Sandy (2012), and Hurricane Matthew (2016) in the US as well as a qualitative case study from news sources in Hoboken, NJ following Hurricane Sandy. I break down social capital into attitudinal and behavioral components. My findings suggest that social capital generally increases following hurricanes. What is notable about these findings is that not all components of social capital reacted uniformly, with formal membership in civil society groups declining overall. There was evidence in the case study to suggest that this trend was offset by informal group behavior and effective government, business, and philanthropic aid. My findings demonstrate that both informal groups and governmental aid can promote post-disaster social capital

“Tutteli to Japan”: A case study of spontaneous collaboration in disaster response

“Tutteli to Japan” (TTJ) is a case study of ordinary people, a group of Japanese women living in Finland, trying to figure out how to help disaster-affected citizens from a distance in coordination with likeminded strangers on-the-ground to accomplish aid supply delivery. Unlike commonly seen in citizen response to disasters, this case did not start as an extension of pre-existing social group activities or an informal group of volunteers under the name of TTJ. Rather, the effort emerged from individual responses on the Internet to the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami disasters in Japan, expressing their compassions and aspirations to do something for the disaster victims; some were on Twitter, some were on their blogs. As the devastation escalated, so did the people’s eagerness to do something about the inadequate distribution of resources, with a focus on the breastfeeding mothers in Japan who only had access to powder-based baby formula. Having this challenge left untouched by government or aid agencies, these concerned individuals, as novice learners of international aid work without a chain of command, continued seeking and sharing information in order to deliver the liquid baby formula regardless of informational, operational, and situational uncertainties surrounding them. Within the next forty days, these volunteer individuals were able to ship six times, a total of 12,000 cartons of formula, directly delivered and distributed to the hands of breastfeeding mothers in twelve different locations in the disaster-affected communities in Japan. In this dissertation, I study the entangled, mutually collaborative nature of finding a way to help processes within and between like-minded individuals and the broader context of people and information with emphasis on information needs and learning. Drawing on a dataset that encompasses a range of real-time social media data as well as interviews and documentation, this single-case study traces how ordinary citizens interacting online develop the idea for delivery of baby formula as emergency supplies and how these like-minded strangers collaboratively mobilized resources for the TTJ logistics and processes of packaging, dispatching and delivering large volumes of relief supply including: the fundraising volunteers in Finland, the drivers and distributors in Japan. This study aims to describe how such ordinary people’s information interactions shape spontaneous collaboration in disaster response. My findings suggest that independent public participation and collaborative efforts for disaster response perform as sources of tensions and various kinds of vagueness, but these are the functions that spontaneous volunteers can offer resourcefully. With learning by doing approaches, these compassionate individuals, both online and on-the-ground, muddled through unknown needs of unfamiliar activities in identifying, managing and processing different kinds of tasks, particularly by asking for information and acting on information received including uses of vague language and uncertain sources of information. This iteration of dual processes – searching for information to help and self-organizing under leaderless management – illuminates underlying processes of spontaneous collaboration. I argue that the TTJ illustrates the power of intention, which is the power of creativity among ordinary people acting on information processed through humane-driven technology use. These iterative information interactions can be best understood through a new concept articulated in this dissertation, shared uncertainty. This concept encompasses our understanding of independent public participation and collaboration and offers an interdisciplinary bridge between research in information behavior, computer-supported cooperative work, crisis informatics and disaster studies

Information Refinement Technologies for Crisis Informatics: User Expectations and Design Implications for Social Media and Mobile Apps in Crises

In the past 20 years, mobile technologies and social media have not only been established in everyday life, but also in crises, disasters, and emergencies. Especially large-scale events, such as 2012 Hurricane Sandy or the 2013 European Floods, showed that citizens are not passive victims but active participants utilizing mobile and social information and communication technologies (ICT) for crisis response (Reuter, Hughes, et al., 2018). Accordingly, the research field of crisis informatics emerged as a multidisciplinary field which combines computing and social science knowledge of disasters and is rooted in disciplines such as human-computer interaction (HCI), computer science (CS), computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and information systems (IS). While citizens use personal ICT to respond to a disaster to cope with uncertainty, emergency services such as fire and police departments started using available online data to increase situational awareness and improve decision making for a better crisis response (Palen & Anderson, 2016). When looking at even larger crises, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it becomes apparent the challenges of crisis informatics are amplified (Xie et al., 2020). Notably, information is often not available in perfect shape to assist crisis response: the dissemination of high-volume, heterogeneous and highly semantic data by citizens, often referred to as big social data (Olshannikova et al., 2017), poses challenges for emergency services in terms of access, quality and quantity of information. In order to achieve situational awareness or even actionable information, meaning the right information for the right person at the right time (Zade et al., 2018), information must be refined according to event-based factors, organizational requirements, societal boundary conditions and technical feasibility. In order to research the topic of information refinement, this dissertation combines the methodological framework of design case studies (Wulf et al., 2011) with principles of design science research (Hevner et al., 2004). These extended design case studies consist of four phases, each contributing to research with distinct results. This thesis first reviews existing research on use, role, and perception patterns in crisis informatics, emphasizing the increasing potentials of public participation in crisis response using social media. Then, empirical studies conducted with the German population reveal positive attitudes and increasing use of mobile and social technologies during crises, but also highlight barriers of use and expectations towards emergency services to monitor and interact in media. The findings led to the design of innovative ICT artefacts, including visual guidelines for citizens’ use of social media in emergencies (SMG), an emergency service web interface for aggregating mobile and social data (ESI), an efficient algorithm for detecting relevant information in social media (SMO), and a mobile app for bidirectional communication between emergency services and citizens (112.social). The evaluation of artefacts involved the participation of end-users in the application field of crisis management, pointing out potentials for future improvements and research potentials. The thesis concludes with a framework on information refinement for crisis informatics, integrating event-based, organizational, societal, and technological perspectives