Adam Widera

Crowdsourcing and crowdtasking in crisis management: Lessons learned from a field experiment simulating a flooding in the city of the Hague

The EU FP7 project DRIVER conducts a number of experiments that explore new approaches for addressing known deficiencies in crisis management. The “Interaction with Citizens” experiment campaign focuses on testing the usability and acceptance of various methods and tools that facilitate crisis communication via several channels. These include: informing, alerting, micro-tasking, incident information crowdsourcing from volunteers, and usage of this information to improve situational awareness. The results highlight that volunteer motivation in a serious game like scenario is important to simulate participation in crisis events. We also argue that the scenario complexity level needs to be simple enough to avoid difficulties in communication with non-professional participants in addition to external influences in a field experiment. In this paper, we present lessons learned from the final experiment of this campaign that investigated two-way communication solutions between crisis managers and citizens or unaffiliated volunteers in a simulated flooding scenario in the city of The Hague.

Pictograms and assessment categories as crisis communication language: Lessons from a field exercise with GDACSmobile

In this article we explore how pictograms and assessment categories used by crisis management organizations support crisis communication with the affected population. In this field exercise simulating a flooding event, the exemplary tool GDACSmobile was used to let volunteers report their observations to the crisis management center using a report in which they assigned the category they believed was most fitting to the situation at hand. Despite volunteers reporting difficulty in selecting a fitting category, their actual decisions fit well with the intended categories defined by the crisis managers. From this, we have learned that pictograms and categories have potential to become a common language between crisis managers and the affected population, thus supporting effective crisis communication.

Humanitarian logistics dashboards design-related requirements analysis

In the paper we present the results of a practitioner-centered requirements analysis for the design of humanitarian logistics dashboards. The work is based on a combination of desk research and its reflection through expert interviews and workshops with logisticians from humanitarian organizations. The identified requirements have been classified following the Design Science Information Systems Research Framework considering the dimensions People, Organizations and Technology. An exemplary application of the design requirements will be briefly presented in the context of designing a performance measurement dashboard for humanitarian logistics being part of the broader research agenda. The results can be used to evaluate existing tools and to design new solutions for the domain of humanitarian logistics.

Improving the Involvement of Digital Volunteers in Disaster Management

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) has been seen as useful information in times of disasters. Several authors have shown that VGI is useful for coping with preparedness and response phases of disaster management. However, because it is still a young technology, the use of VGI remains uncertain, due to its lack of strong reliability and validity. It is our assumption that to improve reliability and validity the promotion of citizen engagement (CE) is needed. CE is not new topic, but in the digital humanitarian context, it involves important factors that are not yet considered by disaster managers, such as communication processes, motivation of volunteers, different media for production of information, etc. To fill this gap, we identified a set of preliminary factors which should be considered to promote the involvement of volunteers in disaster management. These factors were derived from critical review of CE literature and from an analysis of lessons learned from an experiment on interaction with citizens carried out in context of the EU-project “DRIVER – Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience”.