Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Are Crisis Platforms Supporting Citizen Participation?

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Complex Networks IX (CompleNet 2018)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Information systems are central to disaster management, and getting the right information to everyone is fundamental. Besides research, digital systems for disaster management have gained a central role in public and private disaster management organizations. The blogging and social media platforms popularized a decade ago were built around a user-generated content model in which users are not only readers but also producers of information, and their use is now pervasive. During a natural disaster crisis, massive amounts of information are generated via social media, including messages of caution and advice, information about affected individuals, infrastructure damage, volunteering and donations, among others. Based on a review of the literature and a systematic analysis of crisis platforms, we assess the ways in which participation is defined, propose a participation categorization, and evaluate the role that digital platforms may play in supporting community resilience for crisis and extreme events. The present study reviews what kinds of participation crisis computing projects are offered to the citizens of the regions they are scoping, and will evaluate how crowdsourcing is framed and how it is made available to citizens.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Castillo, C.: Big Crisis Data: Social Media in Disasters and Time-Critical Situations. Cambridge University Press, New York (2016)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  2. Schafer, W.A., Ganoe, C.H., Carroll, J.M.: Supporting community emergency management planning through a geocollaboration software architecture. Comput. Support. Coop. Work (CSCW) 16(4), 501–537 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Imran, M., Castillo, C., Lucas, J., Meier, P., Vieweg, S.: Aidr: Artificial intelligence for disaster response. In: 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 159–162. ACM, 07 –11 April 2014

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ofli, F., Meier, P., Imran, M., Castillo, C., Tuia, D., Rey, N., Briant, J., Millet, P., Reinhard, F., Parkan, M., Joost, S.: Combining human computing and machine learning to make sense of big (aerial) data for disaster response. Big Data 4(1), 47–59 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. de Albuquerque, J.P., Eckle, M., Herfort, B., Zipf, A.: Crowdsourcing geographic information for disaster management and improving urban resilience: an overview of recent developments and lessons learned. European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information, pp. 309–321. Ubiquity Press, London (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Palen, L., Anderson, K.M.: Crisis informatics-new data for extraordinary times. Science 353(6296), 224–225 (2016)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  7. Olteanu, A., Vieweg, S., Castillo, C.: What to expect when the unexpected happens. In: Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), pp. 994–1009. ACM (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  8. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.: Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction 2015–2030. Report (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Cutter, S.L., Ash, K.D., Emrich, C.T.: The geographies of community disaster resilience. Glob. Environ. Change 29, 65–77 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Whittaker, J., McLennan, B., Handmer, J.: A review of informal volunteerism in emergencies and disasters: definition, opportunities and challenges. Int. J. Disaster Risk Reduct. 13, 358–368 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Watzlawick, P., Bavelas, J.B., Jackson, D.D.: Pragmatics of Human Communication: A study of Interactional Patterns. Pathologies and Paradoxes. Faber and Faber, London (1967)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Council, N.R.: Applications of Social Network Analysis for Building Community Disaster Resilience: Workshop Summary. The National Academies Press, Washington (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Gimenez, R., Hernantes, J., Labaka, L., Hiltz, S.R., Turoff, M.: Improving the resilience of disaster management organizations through virtual communities of practice: a delphi study. J. Conting. Crisis Manag. 25(3), 160–170 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Licklider, J.C., Taylor, R.W.: The computer as a communication device. Sci. Technol. 76(2), 21–41 (1968)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Taylor, M., Wells, G., Howell, G., Raphael, B.: The role of social media as psychological first aid as a support to community resilience building. Aust. J. Emerg. Manag. 27(1), 20–26 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Castillo, C., Mendoza, M., Poblete, B.: Predicting information credibility in time-sensitive social media. Internet Res. 23(5), 560–588 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Fenton, N.: Social media is. Soc. Media + Soc. 1(1) (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Haynes, N.: Social Media in Northern Chile. UCL Press, London (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Papacharissi, Z.: We have always been social. Soc. Media + Soc. 1(1) (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Wellman, B., Gulia, M.: Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtual Communities As Communities, pp. 331–366. Westview Press, Boulder (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Wellman, B., Salaff, J., Dimitrova, D., Garton, L., Gulia, M., Haythornthwaite, C.: Computer networks as social networks: collaborative work, telework, and virtual community. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 22, 213–238 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Dufty, N.: Using social media to build community disaster resilience. Aust. J. Emerg. Manag. 27(1), 40 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Ghose, R.: Use of information technology for community empowerment: transforming geographic information systems into community information systems. Trans. GIS 5(2), 141–163 (2001)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  24. Shklovski, I., Palen, L., Sutton, J.: Finding community through information and communication technology in disaster response. In: 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), pp. 127–136. ACM (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Simon, T., Goldberg, A., Adini, B.: Socializing in emergencies-a review of the use of social media in emergency situations. Int. J. Inf. Manag. 35(5), 609–619 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. International Federation of Red Cross And Red Crescent Societies.: World disasters report: focus on information in disasters. IFRCRCS (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Poblet, M., García-Cuesta, E., Casanovas, P.: Crowdsourcing tools for disaster management: a review of platforms and methods. AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, pp. 261–274. Springer, Berlin (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Abu-Elkheir, M., Hassanein, H.S., Oteafy, M.A.: Enhancing emergency response systems through leveraging crowdsensing and heterogeneous data. In: 2016 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), pp. 188–193. IEEE (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Besaleva, L.I., Weaver, A.C.: Crowdhelp: a crowdsourcing application for improving disaster management. In: 2013 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC), pp. 185–190. IEEE (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Gruhl, D., Nagarajan, M., Pieper, J., Robson, C., Sheth, A.: Multimodal social intelligence in a real-time dashboard system. VLDB J. 19(6), 825–848 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Cobo, A., Parra, D., Navón, J.: Identifying relevant messages in a twitter-based citizen channel for natural disaster situations. In: 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 1189–1194. ACM (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Liang, G., He, W., Xu, C., Chen, L., Zeng, J.: Rumor identification in microblogging systems based on users’ behavior. IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. 2(3), 99–108 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Starbird, K., Maddock, J., Orand, M., Achterman, P., Mason, R.M.: Rumors, false flags, and digital vigilantes: misinformation on twitter after the 2013 boston marathon bombing. In: iConference 2014 Proceedings, pp. 654 – 662. iSchools, 4–7 March 2014

    Google Scholar 

  34. Tripathy, R.M., Bagchi, A., Mehta, S.: Towards combating rumors in social networks: models and metrics. Intell. Data Anal. 17(1), 149–175 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Ardichvili, A., Page, V., Wentling, T.: Motivation and barriers to participation in virtual knowledge-sharing communities of practice. J. Knowl. Manag. 7(1), 64–77 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Power, R., Robinson, B., Ratcliffe, D.: Finding fires with twitter. In: Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA 2013), pp. 80–89. Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), 4–6 December 2013

    Google Scholar 

  37. Bica, M., Palen, L., Bopp, C.: Visual representations of disaster. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW ’17, pp. 1262–1276. ACM, New York (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  38. David, L., Soon Ae, C., Jaideep, V., Basit, S., Vijay, A., Nabil, R.A.: Peer: a framework for public engagement in emergency response. Int. J. E-Plan. Res. (IJEPR) 4(3), 29–46 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Díaz, P., Aedo, I., Herranz, S.: Citizen participation and social technologies: Exploring the perspective of emergency organizations. In: Hanachi, C.B., Charoy, F., and François (eds) ISCRAM-med 2014: Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management in Mediterranean Countries: First International Conference, pp. 85–97. Springer, 15-17 October 2014

    Google Scholar 

  40. Díaz, P., Carroll, J.M., Aedo, I.: Coproduction as an approach to technology-mediated citizen participation in emergency management. Future Internet 8(3), 41 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Pearce, L.: Disaster management and community planning, and public participation: How to achieve sustainable hazard mitigation. Nat. Hazards 28(2), 211–228 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Arnstein, S.R.: A ladder of citizen participation. J. Am. Inst. Plan. 35(4), 216–224 (1969)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Chilvers, J.: Environmental risk, uncertainty, and participation: mapping an emergent epistemic community. Environ. Plan. A 40(12), 2990–3008 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Haklay, M.: Citizen science and volunteered geographic Information: overview and typology of participation. Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge, pp. 105–122. Springer, Dordrecht (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  45. Stewart, O., Lubensky, D., Huerta, J.M.: Crowdsourcing participation inequality: a scout model for the enterprise domain. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Human Computation, HCOMP ’10, pp. 30–33. ACM, New York (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  46. Park, C.H., Johnston, E.W.: A framework for analyzing digital volunteer contributions in emergent crisis response efforts. N. Media Soc. 19(8), 1308–1327 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Briscoe, E., Appling, S., Schlosser, J.: Technology futures from passive crowdsourcing. IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. 3(1), 23–31 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Loukis, E., Charalabidis, Y.: Active and passive crowdsourcing in government. Policy Practice and Digital Science, pp. 261–289. Springer, Cham (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  49. See, L., Mooney, P., Foody, G., Bastin, L., Comber, A., Estima, J., Fritz, S., Kerle, N., Jiang, B., Laakso, M., Liu, H.-Y., Milčinski, G., Nikšič, M., Painho, M., Pődör, A., Olteanu-Raimond, A.-M., Rutzinger, M.: Crowdsourcing, citizen science or volunteered geographic information? the current state of crowdsourced geographic information. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 5(5), 55 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Stefanidis, A., Crooks, A., Radzikowski, J.: Harvesting ambient geospatial information from social media feeds. GeoJournal 78(2), 319–338 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Shirky, C.: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin, New York (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  52. Sierra, J., Garrido, R.: Volunteering assistance to online geocoding services through a distributed knowledge ssolution. In: The RICH-VGI Workshop at 18th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  53. Starbird, K., Palen, L.: “Voluntweeters”: Self-organizing by digital volunteers in times of crisis, pp. 1071–1080 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  54. Vieweg, S., Palen, L., Liu, S.B., Hughes, A.L., Sutton, J.: Collective intelligence in disaster: An examination of the phenomenon in the aftermath of the 2007 virginia tech shootings. In: Fifth Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM) (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  55. Purohit, H., Hampton, A., Bhatt, S., Shalin, V.L., Sheth, A.P., Flach, J.M.: Identifying seekers and suppliers in social media communities to support crisis coordination. Comput. Support. Coop. Work (CSCW) 23(4), 513–545 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Wenger, E., McDermott, R., Snyder, W.M.: Seven principles for cultivating communities of practice. HBS Working Knowledge, vol. 4. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (2002)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CIGIDEN, National Research Center for Disaster Risk Management, Edificio Hernan Briones, Campus San Joaquin, Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Gonzalo Bacigalupe & Javier Velasco-Martin

  2. CSP, CEHD, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA

    Gonzalo Bacigalupe

Authors
  1. Gonzalo Bacigalupe
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Javier Velasco-Martin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gonzalo Bacigalupe .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Sean Cornelius

  2. Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Kate Coronges

  3. Center for Data Science, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Bruno Gonçalves

  4. Center for Network Science, and Department of Mathematics and its Applications, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Roberta Sinatra

  5. Bouvé College of Health Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Alessandro Vespignani

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Bacigalupe, G., Velasco-Martin, J. (2018). Are Crisis Platforms Supporting Citizen Participation?. In: Cornelius, S., Coronges, K., Gonçalves, B., Sinatra, R., Vespignani, A. (eds) Complex Networks IX. CompleNet 2018. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73198-8_24

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation