Emergency responses are discussed in Palen et al. (2010) as a socially distributed information systems where it is of particularly high importance to understand how data is socially produced and by whom. It is against this, interesting to note that social media actually has, at many occasions, been demonstrated to be useful during crises, and in disaster contexts been useful for compensating for organizational as well as communication weaknesses (Palen and Liu, 2007). The unstructured behavior of information processing in such signifies the need for some mechanisms still respecting the collaborative aspect of information production to improve the efficiency of grass-root mobilization and temporary organization. Social media has furthermore widely been adopted in voluntary organizations as a means to create civic engagement and organize collective action (Obar et al., 2012; Starbird and Palen, 2011), while authorities have been more cautious in their adoption of social media. The hurricane Sandy 2012 had a significant impact in this respect and led to a change in many New York officials’ attitudes and fostered an awareness of and interest in using social media to interact with the public, but even though there is an interest in the possibilities of social media in crisis management there is a significant lack of structured approaches as well as tool support when it comes to important social and deliberative aspects of communication practices, such as coordination and bridge building (Voida et al., 2012), or to motivate long-term commitment to the civic sphere (Starbird and Palen, 2013). There are furthermore still severe problems due to a lack of trust and accountability (Antoniou and Ciaramicoli, 2013) and the highly related question about representation in social media is seldom touched upon at all.

In this project I have therefore explored how to increase the reliability of and representativeness in the informal data acquired from various collective sources, and investigate how patterns of bias in collaborative and decentralized information production online can become more transparent by including tools for analyzing and visualizing aggregated trustworthiness in these respects.

References

Antoniou N and Ciaramicoli M (2013) Social media in the disaste cycle usefule tools or mass distraction? In: International Astronautical Congress, Beijing.

McKay J (2014) How Sandy changed social media strategies in New York City. Emergency Management, Available from: http://www.emergencymgmt.com/disaster/Sandy-Social-Media-Strategies-New-York-City.html (accessed 21 February 2014).

Obar JA, Zube P and Lampe C (2012) Advocacy 2.0: An analysis of how advocacy groups in the United States perceive and use social media as tools for facilitating civic engagement and collective action. Journal of Information Policy, 2, 1–25.

Palen L and Liu SB (2007) Citizen communications in crisis : anticipating a future of ICT-supported public participation. In: CHI 2007 Proceedings, San Jose: ACM, pp. 727–736.

Palen L, Anderson KM, Mark G, et al. (2010) A vision for technology-mediated support for public participation & assistance in mass emergencies & disasters. In: Proceedings of ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science 2010 1, British Informatics Society, pp. 1–12.

Starbird K and Palen L (2011) “Voluntweeters”: Self-organizing by digital volunteers in times of crisis. In: CHI ’11, Vancouver, pp. 1071–1080.

Starbird K and Palen L (2013) Working & sustaining the virtual ‘ disaster desk ’. In: CSCW ’14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, ACM, pp. 491–502.

Sullivan KD and Uccellini LW (2012) Hurricane/post-tropical cyclone Sandy, October 22–29, 2012. Available from: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/assessments/pdfs/Sandy13.pdf.

Voida A, Harmon E and Al-ani B (2012) Bridging between organizations and the public: Volunteer coordinators’ uneasy relationship with social computing. In: CHI’12, Austin.