This project will conduct interdisciplinary, socio-technical research and education that address the current and potential uses of information technology in disaster contexts. The research will examine how data generation and sharing activities by response agencies and the public place new demands on information dissemination processes between these two entities. The research design includes field studies of citizen-generated textual, visual, and digital communications, and of the incident intelligence and public information officer functions in natural hazards events such as wildfires and hurricanes. Results will be in the form of ethnographically-informed models of interaction, data-generation and data-sharing activity that in turn will be put in organizational and institutional context to formulate recommendations for innovators, emergency response practitioners and policy makers engaged in emergency response reform.
Attention to disaster warning, response and recovery is high and widespread, coming from the federal government, national agencies, the private sector and academia. Technological innovation and emergency response reform mean that the relationships between the public and response agencies are becoming more complex. People are natural information seekers and, in uncertain situations like disaster, will persist in integrating information from formal and informal sources to make sense of it. Increased access to camera phones, phone text and picture messaging, and personal Global Positioning System technology means that the communications the public naturally engages in following a disaster produce data that can be appropriated into the response effort. The challenge lies in how this new data pathway could and should be incorporated into response agency activity. For agencies, the rise of GPS capability coupled with geographic information systems is changing the kind and amount of data that incident intelligence can produce not only for incident command but also for an increasingly tech-knowledgeable public. Through these activities, the very interface between agencies and the public is changing. The older, completely linear model of authorities-to-public affairs-to-news media is outmoded and is being replaced by a much more complex model of information dissemination. How can the interface between response agencies and the public better organize and encourage two-way communication and participation?
An important educational goal of this project is to develop future practitioners and researchers who appreciate the complexities of designing policy, processes, and technologies for the highly dynamic situations of disaster. The success of the research relies on a vertically integrated education and training program that includes practitioner and other subject matter expert involvement and a partnership with the Natural Hazards Center. It leverages research to produce a database of modules for use in courses and outreach activities where either domain,methodological or theoretical instruction is needed. Partnership with the National Center for Women and Information Technology is intended to increase the participation of women in the future science and engineering workforce by using examples from this research to illustrate the changing face of information technology careers. The research, education, and results dissemination efforts are built on interdisciplinary partnerships with government agencies and academic institutions, and will launch activities that join fields of research and practice. Results will be disseminated to developers, practitioners, and policy makers in ways that are useful to them.
In the summer of 2005, pre-dating the destruction of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the Gulf Coast, PI Leysia Palen proposed a research program to: "…establish[…] an area of interdisciplinary, socio-technical research and education that addresses the current and potential uses of ICT—and the data they generate—in disaster contexts. I focus on how data generation and sharing activities by response agencies and the public place new demands on information dissemination processes between these two entities. " This proposal came before the dawning of social media, and at a time when even text messaging in the US was not widely adopted. In the time since then, the "Data in Disaster" program that the National Science Foundation has funded at the University of Colorado Boulder established the field of research known as "crisis informatics," elaborating the mission stated above under conditions of rapidly changing events and technology progression. The team assembled under the auspices of the grant has studied and described emergent ICT-abetted social behavior during the response and recovery phases of disaster. The grant has facilitated the production of 34 papers, 3 Masters students, and 4 PhD students. The goal to influence practice and policy is also measured by the team’s frequent participation in local and federal emergency management group meetings to discuss the realities of social media in disaster activity. The research supported by this project has identified how large-scale social systems respond to disaster, and has developed data collection and analysis methods for empirically studying them. People converge onto the digital space much as they do in the physical space to learn about a disaster; several of these become helpers in the information space. Some will attend to the information "stream" and try to share information with others who need it. These people are the ones likely to spot mis-information because of their immersion in the social media space. Many who help on-line are not local to an event. Though much of the information that is propagated in a disaster setting is repetitive, the repetition can serve the function of "recommending" information to others to make sure they see it. In addition to disaster-specific volunteers, some people have professionalized the job of disaster digital volunteerism, working across events around the world in virtual organizations to help collate and deliver accurate information about the event quickly. People innovate in situations of disaster. In the ICT world, many will create new digital resources and, in so doing, develop new skills in information management, information searching, messaging and mapping. People who adopt social media during times of disaster are more likely than those who adopt it for other non-emergency mass convergence events to continue to use it some months later. This may be because the former users were more readily able to detect the problem-solving power of a large ICT-abetted crowd. Though innovative uses of social media abound, this is not to say that social media—and the ways in which people are currently using it—have solved all of disasters' problems. The question is not whether social media is "good" or "bad"; it is rather about what socio-technical potential lies ahead in emergency response. In our research on tens of events around the globe since 2005, we see early behaviors that will likely play out in ways we can further shape. For example, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, we see that many medical groups microblogged about their activities; there is potential here to bring these "pre-coordination" behaviors of "beaconing" to the point of a more orchestrated conversation between decentralized volunteer groups. Emergency management is wrestling with how to optimize social media as part of its policy and practice. Practice often leads policy, with the demands of an emergency situation pushing innovative solutions to address matters in the moment. Public information officers are at the forefront of the emergency organizations with respect to sensing how public participation through social media affects the whole of emergency preparation, warning, response and recovery. Examination of their work and how it is changing set the stage for innovating new technology solutions that help them parse the social media-created information space of disaster quickly, also an outcome of the work funded by this project. The general audience seeks authoritative information during disasters. Our research shows that members of the public welcome the involvement of emergency management in the social media space.
