Social media-driven disaster risk management

Social media have been described as a form of distributed cognition, a mechanism for understanding a situation using information spread across many minds. The interactions among people in social media are a form of collective intelligence, as they allow people to make sense of a developing event collectively. Social media users can contribute to creating a "sensor" for citizen-generated data that modelling or monitoring systems can assimilate during a crisis.

We think that social media constitute a growing data source to help improve response in the early hours and days of a disaster, when gaining situational awareness is critical and time-sensitive. However, social media platforms may not provide the functionality of summarising the information that is useful for crisis responders.

Our work aims to research how to streamline the processing of text and images extracted from social networks in near real-time during crisis. We use a combination of artificial intelligence and DevOps (Development + Operations) techniques developed in-house at JRC as well as through collaboration with top researchers and practitioners around the world.

Survey 

The mission of SMDRM Task Force is to identify, understand, and address the challenges for improving adoption of non-traditional social media data for disaster management by taking a collaborative approach between researchers and practitioners in disaster management to co-design solutions.

In particular, practitioners widely recognise the potential of accessing timely information from citizen-generated data on social media, however, integrating it as supplemental information within traditional information systems of emergency management services is a complex challenge. The task force members have been actively engaged in organizing workshops to increase collaborations between researchers and practitioners to identify various challenges and discover solutions, which includes the first inaugural workshop [Lorini et al., 2021] in December 2020.

The Survey

This survey is based on lessons learned during the 2021 inaugural workshop titled, “Social Media for Disaster Risk Management: Researchers meet Practitioners”, conducted by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and members of its Social Media-driven Disaster Risk Management Task Force.

If you are an expert in emergency and disaster management, we seek your help in this scientific study to understand the current usage of social media among emergency management professionals.

The survey will take approximately 10-15 minutes and the Task Force would appreciate your time participating in this study!

At the end of the survey, you will have the opportunity to further contribute through participation in a future focus group (optional). 

In case of any question you can contact us at the email addresses listed below in the page.

Survey 

• Hemant Purohit, George Mason University, USA (Co-chair)
• Steve Peterson (Montgomery County Community Emergency Response Teams, USA (Co-chair)
• Valerio Lorini, EU Joint Research Centre, Italy (Co-chair)
• Cody Buntain, University of Maryland College Park, USA
• Carlos Castillo, University of Pompeu Fabra, Spain
• Jorge Gomes, Virtual Operations Support Team, Portugal
• Amanda Hughes, Brigham Young University, USA
• Alexandre Penha, National Civil Protection Authority, Portugal
• Paola Rufolo,Fincons, Italy
• Nelles Scholiers, European Commission, DG ECHO, Belgium

SMDRM Task Force is a consortium of researchers from universities and practitioners from disaster management organizations around the globe, facilitated by researchers from the Copernicus Emergency Services at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

You can reach out to any of the following co-chairs: Dr. Hemant Purohit (hpurohit@gmu.edu), Steve Peterson (stevepeterson2@gmail.com), Valerio Lorini (valerio.lorini@ec.europa.eu)