Examples
After the 2010 Haitian earthquake, volunteers across the globe coordinated their efforts via formalised crowdsourcing tools, such as OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi, to aggregate, analyse, and map the flow of visual and textual data coming from Haiti. To do this, they had to translate reports between the three languages.
As the first news swept the globe, students in Boston set up a digital humanitarian initiative called the Ushahidi Haiti Project. A collaboration developed between Haitians on the ground, the students in Boston, the developers of the Ushahidi mapping platform, the globally distributed Haitian diaspora community, and a group of ‘voluntweeters’. A freephone number, 4636, which had already been in use to obtain weather reports was appropriated as ‘Mission 4636’ – an initiative that repurposed the number to receive, process and respond to situation reports from people affected by the earthquake.
However, most of the messages were in Kreyòl and referred to places in slang terms, which were hard to match to places on a map. The international emergency response agencies, who were assisting the almost entirely collapsed local administration, could not use such messages directly to enhance situational awareness. To add to these challenges, there were no detailed shareable digital maps available, on which to plot such data.
A group of ‘Mission 4636’ volunteers, non-governmental organisations and Ushahidi Haiti Project participants mobilised help, including 600 volunteers from all over the globe: to translate the messages into English, to decipher location information and georeference the reports, to categorise the information as actionable, and, to map needs.
When they started, the Open StreetMap of Port Au Prince only detailed main roads and basic infrastructure. A few days later, there were street names, details of land use and the damage caused by the earthquake, and locations of field hospitals and shelters (Meier 2012). According to Morrow et al (2011), the US Department of State analysts and US marines used maps like these to identify ‘centres of gravity’ for the employment of field teams while there is evidence that the distributed collaborative effort also put people who were not on the relief agencies’ radar on the map.
Resources
Artman, H., Brynielsson, J., Johansson, B., and Trnka, J. (2011). Dialogical Emergency Management and Strategic Awareness in Emergency Communication. Proceedings of the 8th International ISCRAM Conference, Lisbon, Portugal. [Link]
Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Birkland, T. (2009). Disasters, Catastrophes, and Policy Failure in the Homeland Security Era 1. Review of Policy Research 26(4): 423–438. [DOI]
Boersma, K., Wolbers, J., and Wagenaar, P. (2010). Organizing Emergent Safety Organizations: The travelling of the concept ‘Netcentric Work in the Dutch Safety sector. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference, Seattle, USA, May 2010 [Link]
Bossong, R. and Hegemann, H. (Eds.) (2015). European Civil Security Governance: Diversity and Cooperation in Crisis and Disaster Management. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.
Büscher, M., Kerasidou, X., Petersen, K. and R. Oliphant (2017 in press). Networked Urbanism and Disaster. In Freudendal-Petersen, M. and Kesselring, S. (Eds). Networked Urban Mobilities. Springer.
Harrald, J. R. (2006). Agility and Discipline: Critical Success Factors for Disaster Response. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 604(1): 256 -272. [DOI]
Jasanoff, S. (2010). Beyond calculation: A Democratic Response to Risk. In A. Lakoff (Ed.), Disaster and the politics of intervention (pp. 14–40). Columbia University Press.
Munro, R. (2013). Crowdsourcing and the Crisis-Affected Community. Lessons Learned and Looking Forward from Mission 4636. Information Retrieval 16(2): 210–66. [DOI] [Link]
Plantin, J-C. (2011). The Map is the Debate: Radiation Webmapping and Public Involvement During the Fukushima Issue. Paper presented at the Oxford Internet Institute, A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, September 12, 2011.
Scolobig, A., Prior, T., Schröter, D., Jörin, J. and Patt, A. (2015) Towards people-centred approaches for effective disaster risk management: Balancing rhetoric with reality. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 12: 202–212. [DOI]
UNISDR. Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015. [Link]
White, J., Palen, L. and Anderson, K.M. (2014). Digital mobilization in disaster response: the work & self-organization of on-line pet advocates in response to hurricane sandy. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing – CSCW ’14, 866–876. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. [DOI]
FEMA, A Whole Community Approach to Emergency Management: Principles, themes, and Pathways for Action. FDOC 104-008-1 2011, Federal Emergency Management Agency. [Link]