Crises catalyze existing and latent groups of people to engage in collective action - asking individuals to pool their undivided attention, unique skills, and valuable informational resources together in order to respond effectively to a range of events, including global health pandemics, wildfires, earthquakes, etc. Once convened, an open question within crisis informatics is how to best organize and coordinate latent groups for effective response, especially those representing traditionally underrepresented populations? This question becomes all the more salient when there are information asymmetries (advantages and disadvantages) between groups that prohibit effective cooperation. In the context of Covid-19 it's critical that information asymmetries are overcome to effectively share and pool informational resources. In particular, there is a need to better align the strategic outreach and formal information dissemination activities of municipal governments with citizen-led cooperative groups focused on distribution of local resources. This project considers the latter to be “networks of care†- individuals coalescing around particular situated vulnerabilities that are revealed or exacerbated by the ongoing global health pandemic. Networks of care, by definition, operate independent from formal government agencies, sometimes because the public sector has failed to care for historically underserved communities.
To study the potential integration of information from networks of care with top-down, centralized, governmental COVID-19 responses, the proposed research-centered pilot project seeks to prototype modular protocols for data creation, analysis, and use - co-designed with care networks, public libraries, and municipal government in Seattle and Boston. These protocols will be flexible to a variety of disasters and crises, and usable in less extreme contexts to build resilience to future pandemics or other crisis events. These protocols will also specifically address privacy protections and data formats, as well as data literacy, collection, storage, cleaning, analysis, visualization, use, and deletion that are necessary for meaningful data exchange.
During the four month planning grant the PI team will be assembled and the research team will collect and assess the relevance of municipal 311, Twitter, and other open data about COVID-19 in Seattle and Boston. Major top-down and bottom-up sources of information about the pandemic will be catalogued, and care networks beyond those named in this planning grant will be prioritized for potential engagement during a full award. Participating care networks will be engaged so as to gather information about the types of data they are collecting, whether they share any of that data and with whom, and their preferences for privacy protections in exchanging information with local governments. Engagement activities under this planning grant will include remote video-conferencing meetings among the community and city partners, as well as the PI team, senior personnel academic collaborators and consultants. Facilitation will elicit further community-based participants or relevant stakeholders and provide the basis for a future pilot proposal.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
