ABSTRACT
Pets are important household members, and their welfare and safety are imperative to the emotional welfare of the family. Displacement of pets after disaster events is a serious matter to families and for public safety at large. People are not willing to evacuate without their non-human family members; many will break through evacuation zones to recover animals left behind. In the 2005 Hurricane Katrina event, over 200,000 pets were displaced, and 95% of them were never reunited with their families. The US Department of Agriculture confirms that the problem of reuniting displaced pets and their guardians at this scale is unfortunately common in disaster events. We introduce No Place Like Home, a socially networked web and mobile platform that facilitates reunification of non-human with human family members following disaster events. No Place Like Home is an effort that supports the formation of small cadres of micro-tasking 'digital volunteers' that converge after disasters to do photo- and description-matching; employs a reputation and reward system to encourage use; and uses match-based machine learning techniques to accelerate the manual matching tasks performed by digital volunteers.
- Fritz, C. E. and J.H. Mathewson. 1957. Convergence Behavior in Disasters: A Problem in Social Control. Committee on Disaster Studies, Disaster Research Group. Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
- Hunt, M., Al-Awadi, H, & Johnson, M. (2008). Psychological sequelae of pet loss following Hurricane Katrina. A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People & Animals, Vol 21, Number 2, June 2008, pp.109--121(13).Google Scholar
- Lowe, S, Rhodes J, Zwiebach, L. and Chan, C (2000) The Impact of Pet Loss on the Perceived Social Support and Psychological Distress of Hurricane Survivors, Journal of Traumatic Stress, 22:3 pp. 244-Google ScholarCross Ref
- McNabb, M. (2007). Pets in the eye of the storm: Hurricane Katrina floods the courts with pet custody disputes. 14 Animal L. 71 (2007--2008).Google Scholar
- Palen, L., Anderson, K. M., Mark, G., Martin, J., Sicker, D., Palmer, M., & Grunwald, D. (2010). A vision for technology-mediated support for public participation & assistance in mass emergencies & disasters. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science Conference (p. 8). British Computer Society. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act of 2006. Public Law 109--308 (2006) Citation 2006 120 STAT. 1725.Google Scholar
- Starbird, K and Palen, L. (2011). "Voluntweeters": Self-Organizing by Digital Volunteers in Times of Crisis. Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference of Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011). Vancouver, CA. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- No place like home: pet-to-family reunification after disaster
Recommendations
Finding community through information and communication technology in disaster response
CSCW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workDisasters affect not only the welfare of individuals and family groups, but also the well-being of communities, and can serve as a catalyst for innovative uses of information and communication technology (ICT). In this paper, we present evidence of ICT ...
Data that matter: opportunities in crisis informatics research
WSDM '14: Proceedings of the 7th ACM international conference on Web search and data miningIn an increasingly global society and on a planet experiencing effects of climate change, large-scale emergencies both instigated by humans and arising from nature can devastate human life and our tightly- woven social fabric. With a promise of improved ...
Supporting the Information Management Needs of People Helping Animals in Disasters
GROUP '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group WorkMany things influence human decision-making in disasters. This work considers the information management needs and collaborative work of those focused on animal care and evacuation in disasters. Empirical ethnographic work on-site at two animal ...
Comments