The Good, the Bad, and the Uncertain: Contributions of Volunteered Geographic Information to Community Disaster Resilience

Abstract

The adoption of location-based information sharing technologies, and the emergence of volunteered geographic information (VGI), has seen changes to community involvement in disaster management. The concept of resilience, and recognition of the capacity for renewal, reorganization , and societal development, has gained currency in disaster management. However, the opportunities presented by spatially referenced data for sourcing contextual information for understanding processes of socialecological resilience and fostering local inclusion has not been examined. We examine how web 2.0 platforms, including VGI and social media, can support resilience building, and critically evaluate how these technologies potentially undermine resilience. We concentrate our analysis on factors deemed important for community disaster resilience through review of recent literature, policy documents, and author experience. Establishing which elements of VGI in disaster management should be emphasized, such as increased flexibility or individual empowerment, and which require careful management, such as compromised privacy or data quality, will enable VGI to become less opportunistic, data-centric, disruptive, and exclusionary, and allow for more reliable, community-centric, complementary, and socially inclusive practices. Incorporating awareness and training on collaborative geoweb technologies into disaster preparedness programs will equip individuals to make informed judgments on VGI content and reduce unintended consequences of social media initiatives.

Geographic Information and Communication Technologies for Supporting Smallholder Agriculture and Climate Resilience

“…These technologies have contributed to advances in precision agriculture and improved crop management in commercial broad acre agriculture [39][40][41], yet AGI utilisation by smallholders remains limited. Reflecting on successes from other sectors, geographic information has been used to respond to natural disasters and increase community resilience across a range of environments [42,43], and resilience building in the agricultural sector, particularly in smallholder communities, has similar use potential. Such an aspiration aligns well with the concept of climate smart agriculture (CSA)-to increase food and livelihood security, and farming and landscape resilience [8,44,45]-but explicitly identifies smallholders' needs for improved information access to enable better decision making for sustainable agriculture.…”

Volunteered Geographic Information Users Contributions Pattern and its Impact on Information Quality

“…Indeed, VGI is part of a broader phenomenon known as 'usergenerated content' in the Internet world [1,11]. The adaption of technologies such as GPS, Web 2.0, and location-based information-sharing and the emergence of VGI have shifted the spatio-temporal scales of community involvement [12]. Fast paced production and dissemination of VGI generated spatial knowledge is particularly useful when managing events demanding rapid response [3].…”

Creating the Conditions for Community Resilience: Aberdeen, Scotland—An Example of the Role of Community Planning Groups

“…The communities term can be used to describe all types of human geographic settlements, as well as economic and social interactions and connections (Murphy 2007;Frankenberger et al 2013). In the literature on community resilience the importance of the dynamic nature of social and ecological interactions is recognized (MacKinnon and Derickson 2013;Haworth et al 2018).…”