Onook Oh

Community intelligence and social media services: a rumor theoretic analysis of tweets during social crises

Recent extreme events show that Twitter, a micro-blogging service, is emerging as the dominant social reporting tool to spread information on social crises. It is elevating the online public community to the status of first responders who can collectively cope with social crises. However, at the same time, many warnings have been raised about the reliability of community intelligence obtained through social reporting by the amateur online community. Using rumor theory, this paper studies citizen-driven information processing through Twitter services using data from three social crises: the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, the Toyota recall in 2010, and the Seattle cafe shooting incident in 2012. We approach social crises as communal efforts for community intelligence gathering and collective information processing to cope with and adapt to uncertain external situations. We explore two issues: (1) collective social reporting as an information processing mechanism to address crisis problems and gather community intelligence, and (2) the degeneration of social reporting into collective rumor mills. Our analysis reveals that information with no clear source provided was the most important, personal involvement next in importance, and anxiety the least yet still important rumor causing factor on Twitter under social crisis situations.

Rules of Crowdsourcing: Models, Issues, and Systems of Control

In this article, the authors first provide a practical yet rigorous definition of crowdsourcing that incorporates “crowds,” outsourcing, and social web technologies. They then analyze 103 well-known crowdsourcing web sites using content analysis methods and the hermeneutic reading principle. Based on their analysis, they develop a “taxonomic theory” of crowdsourcing by organizing the empirical variants in nine distinct forms of crowdsourcing models. They also discuss key issues and directions, concentrating on the notion of managerial control systems.

Information control and terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai terrorist attack through twitter

This paper analyzes the role of situational information as an antecedent of terrorists’ opportunistic decision making in the volatile and extreme environment of the Mumbai terrorist attack. We especially focus on how Mumbai terrorists monitored and utilized situational information to mount attacks against civilians. Situational information which was broadcast through live media and Twitter contributed to the terrorists’ decision making process and, as a result, increased the effectiveness of hand-held weapons to accomplish their terrorist goal. By utilizing a framework drawn from Situation Awareness (SA) theory, this paper aims to (1) analyze the content of Twitter postings of the Mumbai terror incident, (2) expose the vulnerabilities of Twitter as a participatory emergency reporting system in the terrorism context, and (3), based on the content analysis of Twitter postings, we suggest a conceptual framework for analyzing information control in the context of terrorism.

Conceptual Foundations of Crowdsourcing: A Review of IS Research

Crowd sourcing is a collaboration model enabled by people-centric web technologies to solve individual, organizational, and societal problems using a dynamically formed crowd of people who respond to an open call for participation. We report on a literature survey of crowd sourcing research, focusing on top journals and conferences in the Information Systems (IS) field. To our knowledge, ours is the first effort of this type in the IS discipline. Contributions include providing a synopsis of crowd sourcing research to date, a common definition for crowd sourcing, and a conceptual model for guiding future studies of crowd sourcing. We show how existing IS literature applies to the elements of that conceptual model: Problem, People (Problem Owner, Individual, and Crowd), Governance, Process, Technology, and Outcome. We close with suggestions for future research.

An exploration of unintended online private information disclosure in educational institutions across four countries

Advanced Google search queries can be used to extract sensitive information from websites that can potentially be exploited for malice. The purpose of this paper is to identify the existence of unintended private information disclosure possibilities in educational institutions across four countries through advanced search techniques such as Google Hacking. Google Hacking is a technique of retrieving information that may not be intended for public retrieval using advanced Google search operators. The focus is on the country level comparison of Excel files which contain unintended private information. For this exploratory study, we used relevant Google hacking search queries to retrieve Excel spreadsheet files which contain personally identifiable information from higher education institutions of India, US, South Korea, and Romania. Our analysis of these retrieved files establishes that each country shows (1) a different perception of privacy, (2) a different practice of information sharing and (3) a different degree of vulnerability and exposure. Finally, based on our findings, we recommend policy requirements which can be used to prevent higher education institutions from accidentally exposing individuals to potential cybercrimes through Google Hacking.

ICT mediated rumor beliefs and resulting user actions during a community crisis

Abstract In the context of Internet and Communications Technology (ICT), this research investigates the acceptance of hate rumor and its consequence during a community crisis situation. Extending prior rumor research for this context, we develop and test a refined model using data collected from victims of a large scale (hate) rumor spread incident. Our data analyses present three main findings. First, during the crisis situation, platform characteristics of media synchronicity and richness of expression affected the likelihood of rumor recipients believing the false rumor to be a true message. Second, rumors received from people with closer social ties were more likely to be believed as true. Third, rumor belief during the crisis was associated with greater intensity of informational and behavioral actions. Our findings provide governments with insights to mitigate the spread of hate rumor especially under community disaster situations. Implications for research and policy are discussed. This paper contributes to the IS literature on rumor theory and its implications by explaining how diverse communication technologies are used in a community crisis, thereby opening new avenue for future research to address the negative consequences of using communication media in the complex ICT mediated world. It shows how media characteristics along with social ties affect the “politics of plausibility”.

Digital Transformation in Police Work: A Sociomaterial Perspective on Police Body Worn Cameras (BWC)

The need to augment human capabilities through computer-based technologies, and a belief in the “objectivity” of data has contributed to the popularity of wearables. Such is the case with BWCs and their proliferation in police organizations. Unfortunately, BWCs have not been studied from an IS perspective, using specific or complementary theories applied in IS. We address this gap with a case study of a mid-sized police department, using a sociomaterial lens. We find that BWCs have triggered significant unanticipated changes in police practice. The impacts of these changes are not uniformly distributed. Rank-and-file patrol officers carry the burden upfront, while evidence technicians are burdened on the backend. We contribute by providing an actual account of the changes and impacts of BWCs in policing; providing initial evidence of how BWCs meet policing goals; and demonstrating the applicability of sociomateriality in explicating wearable technologies in general, and BWCs in particular.

A Definition of Community Crowdsourcing Engagement and Application

Crowdsourcing refers to the use of technologies to gather the collective effort and wisdom from an undefined group of online users for organizational innovation and/or problem solving. A critical challenge for crowdsourcing users and providers is to engage online participants to make sustained contributions. This research in progress paper proposes a behavioural perspective on the definition and measurement of participant engagement in community crowdsourcing, a crowdsourcing model where all participants can see and react to everyone else ideas. In our research, we propose to conceive participant engagement as a set of engaging behaviours and evaluate it through the magnitude, temporal intensity, diversity, and recency of these behaviours. We illustrate the construct operationalization by the Participant Engagement Index (PEI) that quantifies engaging behaviours in the context of MindMixer, a community crowdsourcing service provider. We further provide an initial illustration of the PEI’s utility through the analysis of field project data from MindMixer. We expect that our study will provide guidance for future research into existing and new practices to study and improve the active and sustained participation of crowds in open collaboration forums.

Engaging with Online Crowd: A Flow Theory Approach

Online collaborative problem solving (OCPS) refers to the use of social web technologies to garner netizens’ collective effort for problem solving and innovation tasks. The model has enabled organizations to involve online users in organizational works at large scale. However, success of this kind of initiatives depends much on, among other things, user engagement, or the amount of effort online users voluntarily devote to what are requested in an OCPS initiative. We argue that an important influence on user engagement in OCPS events is their experience when participating in the events. We further argue that Flow Theory by Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi (1988) provides much insights on how to improve this experience. In addition, we propose to measure the psychological construct “flow” through a novel physiological-psychometric approach. In this paper, detailed discussion of our theoretical standpoint and the design of a lab experiment to validate our hypotheses are provided.

The role of online freelance stock analysts in correcting overly pessimistic market sentiment

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of online freelance stock analysts in correcting mispricing of hard-to-value firms during sentiment-driven market periods.,The sample covers 23,758 Seeking Alpha articles obtained for the period between January 2005 and September 2011. The authors use OLS regressions to test the stock market reaction around Seeking Alpha analysts’ reports. The information in online analysts’ reports is measured by the tone of stock articles posted in SeekingAlpha.com (SA).,The analysis reveals that the degree of negative tone of their stock articles is related to three-day stock returns around the article posting dates. It further reveals that the relation between these returns and prevailing market sentiment depends on firm-specific susceptibility to the market sentiment. The three-day stock returns are higher during low market sentiment periods for firms that are more susceptible to the market sentiment, hence, harder to value. The tone of the stock articles during low sentiment periods also predicts the news in the forthcoming earnings.,The findings help stock investors identify value-relevant information provided by online freelance stock analysts, particularly for hard-to-value stocks and during the low market sentiment period.,This study utilizes a unique dataset obtained from SA. This is the first paper to examine whether online analysts help investors correct potential undervaluation of hard-to-value firms during the low market sentiment period.