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Process Workflow in Crowdsourced Digital Disaster Responses

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11185))

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Abstract

This paper examines the workflow and sense-making activities of digital volunteers, showing how they acquire, assess, process and scrutinise crowdsourced information to warrant confidence that the data satisfies the standard of engagement, production and analysis. We do so by studying a digital disaster response organisation - Humanity Road - through fifteen response operations across thirteen countries using digital ethnography over a period of sixteen months. This paper reports on the findings of this study, using a range of sources such as Skype chat logs, field notes, social media postings, and official documents. Our paper introduces a framework that offers a consistent and structured workflow for the communities of practice related to social media and data aggregation communities within the domain of Digital Humanitarian Networks. Our findings suggest practical implications for both the digital humanitarian organisations and government of the disaster-prone countries.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Brunel University London, London, UK

    Najeeb G. Abdulhamid, Mark Perry & Armin Kashefi

Authors
  1. Najeeb G. Abdulhamid
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  2. Mark Perry
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  3. Armin Kashefi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Najeeb G. Abdulhamid .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany

    Steffen Staab

  2. National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Olessia Koltsova

  3. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Dmitry I. Ignatov

Appendices

Appendices

1.1 Appendix 1

See Table 1.

Table 1. Summary of the disasters used in the study
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1.2 Appendix 2

See Figs. 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Illustration of the ‘Listing’ phase.

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Fig. 4.
figure 4

Illustration of the ‘Listening & Verification’ phase.

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Fig. 5.
figure 5

Illustration of the ‘Reporting’ phase.

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Fig. 6.
figure 6

Process workflow.

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Abdulhamid, N.G., Perry, M., Kashefi, A. (2018). Process Workflow in Crowdsourced Digital Disaster Responses. In: Staab, S., Koltsova, O., Ignatov, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11185. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_1

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