How can VGI be incorporated into Disaster Risk Management?
Nov 17th, 2014 by j0p
by F.Ruehl
The aftermaths of the 2010 Haiti earthquake have shown that the public can be engaged in response to an acute crisis and moreover is able to organize and engage itself. The involvement of citizens in reaction to (crisis-) situations is not new and has been practiced in citizen sciences for some decades. However, the spontaneous emerging of volunteers around the world, contributing information and processing data to effectively respond to a disaster like the Haiti earthquake is a new phenomenon.
Both citizen science and digital volunteerism are offering capabilities to bridge information gaps, particularly in crisis situations where infrastructure and traditional information systems are broken or crisis response mechanisms are overloaded. Crowdsourcing offers the capacity to quickly process huge amounts of data and might represent the only source of information in certain situations. Consequently, crowdsourcing and especially volunteered geographic information (VGI) is necessary to complete official information for policy makers and emergency responders in certain crisis situations.
This conclusion, however, raises the question of how such information can be incorporated into disaster risk management. That’s the topic of this blogpost and further seminar work.
The question of incorporation of VGI faces a major problem: „What is lacking in the field of crisis informatics is a conceptual framework … to integrate and operationalize crisis crowdsourcing into the official emergency management environment.“ (Liu 2014: 6).
To solve this problem Liu (2014) develops a Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework. Activities like VGI and their integration in management processes are a cooperative work, therefore Liu builds up the framework based on Fujak et al.’s six dimensions of cooperative work (cf. Liu 2014: 17).
Those dimensions are (Liu 2014:; 18):
• Why: “Identify the information problem to determine the crowd task needed”
• Who: “Identify the types of crowds and expertise needed for the crowd task”
• What: “Identify the interaction flows for engaging crowds“
• When: “Identify temporal aspects in relation to the disaster lifecycle”
• Where “Identify spatial aspects of the crisis, crowds, and crowd tasks”
• How: “Identify social, technological, organizational, and policy (STOP) interfaces”
The last dimension we would like to focus on in this blogpost, since the question of how VGI can be integrated by identifying certain interfaces, is directly linked to all other five dimensions. The first five dimensions drive the way of incorporation into the disaster risk management processing. This fact gets obvious when looking on the necessary conditions for a successful incorporation. According to Liu (2014) it is necessesary to focus on “Social, Technological, Organizational, and Policy (STOP) interfaces to operationalize” VGI in the disaster risk management environment.
The social interface covers all questions of the crowdsourcing phenomenon as it comes to social standards such as norms and practices concerning the topic of VGI, for example. Often concerns are risen about data reliability, which stem from the fact that crowdsourcing tasks are not only proceeded by professionals. However, trust in data is strongly connected to the dimension of who is proceeding and what kind of data is in process. Is there mutual trust between for example international agencies and volunteers? A good empirical example for a close relationship and shared norms are the ties between the UNOCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) and a volunteer community called Standby Task Force through the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHNetwork). For years both sides have been working together effectively. In general, decision makers need to be convinced by the capabilities of crowdsourcing and they need to trust in the information gathering process due to encouraging experiences in the past or shared norms and beliefs.
The development of technical systems or tools further influences the question of incorporation and is treated as technological interface. Without adequately designed technical backing delivering the demanded data would be impossible for a crowdsourcing. Systems have to be able to proceed and carry large amounts of data and have to offer a user-friendly surface to proceed tasks without failures due to wrong usage. For example, if a government agency demands for volunteers interfaces are needed addressing both the agencies demands and the users ability to work with it as a tool. Thereby the question of technical design is obviously linked to the question, which users (=who) should be addressed and what kind of crowd interaction is necessary to succeed the tasks.
Conflicting situations between agencies, emergency response bodies and the public are common in crisis situation. The organizational interface encompasses the recognition of such conflicts and the integration of new elements into standard procedures and workflows. Therefore the DHNetwork can be seen as an example of an organizational interface to incorporate crowdsourcing into the decision-making process of the UN agencies.
The policy interface plays a major role when it comes to legal standards and challenges. Often, law poses restriction to the usage of data. For example, expensive high-resolution satellite imagery is usually not available free of charge. However, such data is often needed to actively support the work of the volunteers when for example mapping crisis situations. Given the exceptionalism of most large-scale disaster situations, such data is usually provided free of charge. However, in smaller scale situations where crowdsourcing would bring major advantage such data can’t be use. When using data of social networks it has to be clear that such data usage is covered by the terms of usage and data protection standards.
All these interfaces have to be taken into consideration if one would answer the question of how to incorporate VGI into Disaster Risk Management. Additionally, if one would set guidelines for the whole process, even the way VGI is generated one has to take into account the other five dimension in detail before dealing with the question of how to incorporate the information into management procedures All this has to be addressed „to better support the mass-coordinating challenges“ (Liu 2014: 6) not only in this seminar but in the disaster management as a whole.
Literature and recommended readings:
Liu S. B. (2014): Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework: Designing Strategic Configurations of Crowdsourcing for the Emergency Management Domain. In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
Vivacqua, A. S. & Borges, M. R. S. (2012): Taking advantage of collective knowledge in emergency response systems. In: Journal of Network And Computer Applications, 35(1), 189-198.
Roche S., Propeck-Zimmermann, E. & Mericskay, B. (2013): GeoWeb and crisis management: issues and perspectives of volunteered geographic information. In: Geo Journal, 78(1), 21-40.
Crowley J. (2013): Connecting Grassroots and Government for Disaster Response. Washington D.C.
Cobb, C., McCarthy, T., Perkins, A., Bharadwaj, A., Comis, J. Do, B. & Starbird, K. (2014): Designing for the Deluge: Understanding & Supporting the Distributed, Collaborative Work of Crisis Volunteers. In: Proceedings of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2014.
HIS (2011): Disaster relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies. Washington D.C. and Berkshire, UK.
OCHA (2013): Humanitarianism in the Network Age (including World Humanitarian Data and Trends 2012). Retrieved from on 10/31/2014 from: http://www.unocha.org/node/11528
Tapia, A.H. & Moore, K. (2014): Good Enough is Good Enough: Overcoming Disaster Response Organizations’ Slow Social Media Data Adoption. In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).