Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief

Gao, Huiji; Barbier, Geoffrey; Goolsby, Rebecca; Zeng, Daniel

doi:10.21236/ada581803

Cited by 175 publications

(178 citation statements)

References 1 publication

(2 reference statements)

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“…Following the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti, people began sharing their personal experiences of the devastation through Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and YouTube (Smith ). When phone lines went down in Japan following the 2011 tsunami, people turned to social media to communicate with family and organize local responses (Gao, Barbier, and Goolsby ). According to Hall and Phillips “Twitter, in particular, has proven extremely useful in sharing information and connecting individuals around the globe after a natural disaster, mobilizing people to raise funds, offering opportunity to comment on relief efforts, and raising awareness through trending topics and hashtags” (2012: 44).…”

Section: Social Collaborative Technologies and Public Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public engagement in the Web 2.0 era: Social collaborative technologies in a public sector context

McNutt

2014

Can Public Adm

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This article examines how social collaborative technologies have changed the nature and scope of e-participation, showcasing several popular modes of engagement. It argues that the main implementation barriers to social media adoption are not technological, but rather organizational, cultural, and administrative. While there is enormous potential for Web 2.0 and associated social media tools to expand public engagement, the design of such initiatives must recognize that in digital environments influence is earned through social reputation, not bureaucratic authority.Sommaire : Cet article examine comment les technologies de collaboration sociale ont changé la nature et l'envergure de la participation en ligne, en mettant en valeur plusieurs modes populaires de mobilisation. Il fait valoir que les principaux obstacles à l'adoption des médias sociaux ne sont pas technologiques, mais plutôt organisationnels, culturels et administratifs. Alors que le Web 2.0 et les outils de médias sociaux connexes présentent un énorme potentiel d'accroître la mobilisation du public, la conception de telles initiatives doit reconnaître que dans les environnements numériques, on acquiert de l'influence grâce à sa réputation sociale et non à son autorité bureaucratique.Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences (O'Reilly 2007: 17).2.0 has become a popular suffix added onto various organizations and processes including business 2.0, not-for-profit 2.0, democracy 2.0, and SOCIAL COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGIES

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Section: Social Collaborative Technologies and Public Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public engagement in the Web 2.0 era: Social collaborative technologies in a public sector context

McNutt

2014

Can Public Adm

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“…Many HOs have recognized the value of social media platforms and have started using them to access and share information from various sources. This includes data from informants with first‐hand knowledge of what is occurring in affected areas (Gao et al., 2011), and recently, HOs have aggregated these data to create crisis maps showing landmarks like damaged infrastructure and shelters (Meier, 2012). HOs have also used social media to share capacity levels and resource availability to enhance coordination among stakeholders (Sarcevic et al., 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating information diffusion speed and its determinants in social media networks during humanitarian crises

Yoo

Rand

Eftekhar

et al. 2016

J of Ops Management

136

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The rapid diffusion of information is critical to combat the extreme levels of uncertainty and complexity that surround disaster relief operations. As a means of gathering and sharing information, humanitarian organizations are becoming increasingly reliant on social media platforms based on the Internet. In this paper, we present a field study that examines how effectively information diffuses through social media networks embedded in these platforms. Using a large dataset from Twitter during Hurricane Sandy, we first applied Information Diffusion Theory to characterize diffusion rates. Then, we empirically examined the impact of key elements on information propagation rates on social media. Our results revealed that internal diffusion through social media networks advances at a significantly higher speed than information in these networks coming from external sources. This finding is important because it suggests that social media networks are effective at passing information along during humanitarian crises that require urgent information diffusion. Our results also indicate that dissemination rates depend on the influence of those who originate the information. Moreover, they suggest that information posted earlier during a disaster exhibits a significantly higher speed of diffusion than information that is introduced later during more eventful stages in the disaster. This is because, over time, participation in the diffusion of information declines as more and more communications compete for attention among users.

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“…Gao et al. ). The challenges are reflections of the very nature of these datasets: diverse data structures and formats, and variations in quality and accuracy (Agichtein et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Triangulating Social Multimedia Content for Event Localization using Flickr and Twitter

Panteras

Wise

et al. 2014

Transactions in GIS

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The analysis of social media content for the extraction of geospatial information and event-related knowledge has recently received substantial attention. In this article we present an approach that leverages the complementary nature of social multimedia content by utilizing heterogeneous sources of social media feeds to assess the impact area of a natural disaster. More specifically, we introduce a novel social multimedia triangulation process that uses both Twitter and Flickr content in an integrated two-step process: Twitter content is used to identify toponym references associated with a disaster; this information is then used to provide approximate orientation for the associated Flickr imagery, allowing us to delineate the impact area as the overlap of multiple view footprints. In this approach, we practically crowdsource approximate orientations from Twitter content and use this information to orient Flickr imagery accordingly and identify the impact area through viewshed analysis and viewpoint integration. This approach enables us to avoid computationally intensive image analysis tasks associated with traditional image orientation, while allowing us to triangulate numerous images by having them pointed towards the crowdsourced toponym location. The article presents our approach and demonstrates its performance using a real-world wildfire event as a representative application case study.With the general public nowadays having at its fingertips technology that a few years ago was available only to advanced computing laboratories, it is only natural that the amount of crowdsourced information of computational merit is rapidly growing, with volunteered geographical information (VGI) being a large portion of this content (Goodchild 2007). Both domain experts and amateurs alike can now generate and disseminate geospatial content 2 G Panteras, S Wise, X Lu, A Croitoru, A Crooks and A Stefanidis

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Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief

Cited by 175 publications

References 1 publication

Public engagement in the Web 2.0 era: Social collaborative technologies in a public sector context

Public engagement in the Web 2.0 era: Social collaborative technologies in a public sector context

Evaluating information diffusion speed and its determinants in social media networks during humanitarian crises

Triangulating Social Multimedia Content for Event Localization using Flickr and Twitter

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