Improving the impact of digital volunteers in disaster response: user-centered design and policy approach

Abstract

Emergency and disaster management has been transformed by mobile technologies and social media. There has been growing interest and research on how to leverage the deluge of social media data for disaster management, including online platforms and tools that focus on crowdsourced data. In many cases, crowdsourced data can be more accurate and obtained faster than traditional sources, especially due to contributions by digital volunteers. Digital volunteers are those remotely located to a disaster that contribute either as individuals or within networks or organizations to the response effort. Due to the heterogeneity of possible volunteers, it is difficult to create a shared understanding of data and to ensure utility for the emergency and disaster responders on the ground. This thesis applies a human-centered design approach to understand stakeholder perceptions and motivations for being a digital volunteer and to analyze the utility and reliability of crowdsourced and digital volunteer contributions. A design perspective is used to map out important features of a digital volunteer platform, while a policy perspective sheds light on the access and limitations of digital volunteers in disaster response. This multifaceted study reveals the distributions of various types of critical information that can assist disaster responders as well as facilitate the development of crowdsourcing and social media for disaster response.