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A European Perspective on Crisis InformaticsSelf-Organisation of Digital Volunteers across Social Media

A European Perspective on Crisis Informatics: Self-Organisation of Digital Volunteers across... [Recent disasters have shown an increase in the significance of social media for both affected citizens and volunteers alike in the coordination of information and organisation of relief activities, often independently of and in addition to the official emergency response. Existing research mainly focuses on the ways in which individual platforms are used by volunteers in response to disasters. This chapter examines the use of social media during the European Floods of 2013 and proposes a novel cross-social-media application for volunteers. First, the results of an empirical study are presented. Public reporting during the event indicated, and our analysis confirms that Twitter, Facebook (FB), Google Maps and other services were frequently used by affected citizens and volunteers to coordinate help activities among themselves. We conducted a qualitative analysis of selected emergent volunteer communities in Germany on FB and Twitter among others, and subsequently conducted interviews with FB group founders and activists. Our aim was to analyse the use of social media during this particular event, especially with regard to the activities of digital volunteers. Our study illustrates the relevance of social media for German citizens in cases of disaster, focusing especially on the role of the moderator. Our particular focus was the embedding of social media in the organisational work conducted by said volunteers, emphasising both the patterns of social media use and resulting challenges. We show that different social media platforms were used in different ways: Twitter was primarily used for status updates while FB-pages were mostly intended to provide an overview of a broad range of information. FB-groups also coordinated a multitude of activities. Second, the results of our design case study (Wulf et al., 2011) are presented, which aims to examine how real and virtual relief activities might be supported by specific tools. These activities are initiated and coordinated through the use of social media. Challenges were identified based on this study and an attempt was made to address these challenges by means of XHELP, our cross-social-media application for volunteers in emergencies, particularly for moderators of emerging groups. We finally evaluated XHELP with 20 users.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A European Perspective on Crisis InformaticsSelf-Organisation of Digital Volunteers across Social Media

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Publisher
Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022
ISBN
978-3-658-39719-7
Pages
191 –235
DOI
10.1007/978-3-658-39720-3_6
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Recent disasters have shown an increase in the significance of social media for both affected citizens and volunteers alike in the coordination of information and organisation of relief activities, often independently of and in addition to the official emergency response. Existing research mainly focuses on the ways in which individual platforms are used by volunteers in response to disasters. This chapter examines the use of social media during the European Floods of 2013 and proposes a novel cross-social-media application for volunteers. First, the results of an empirical study are presented. Public reporting during the event indicated, and our analysis confirms that Twitter, Facebook (FB), Google Maps and other services were frequently used by affected citizens and volunteers to coordinate help activities among themselves. We conducted a qualitative analysis of selected emergent volunteer communities in Germany on FB and Twitter among others, and subsequently conducted interviews with FB group founders and activists. Our aim was to analyse the use of social media during this particular event, especially with regard to the activities of digital volunteers. Our study illustrates the relevance of social media for German citizens in cases of disaster, focusing especially on the role of the moderator. Our particular focus was the embedding of social media in the organisational work conducted by said volunteers, emphasising both the patterns of social media use and resulting challenges. We show that different social media platforms were used in different ways: Twitter was primarily used for status updates while FB-pages were mostly intended to provide an overview of a broad range of information. FB-groups also coordinated a multitude of activities. Second, the results of our design case study (Wulf et al., 2011) are presented, which aims to examine how real and virtual relief activities might be supported by specific tools. These activities are initiated and coordinated through the use of social media. Challenges were identified based on this study and an attempt was made to address these challenges by means of XHELP, our cross-social-media application for volunteers in emergencies, particularly for moderators of emerging groups. We finally evaluated XHELP with 20 users.]

Published: Nov 13, 2022

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