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Abstract |
Emergency managers continue to struggle with a lack of staff, information processing tools, and sufficient trust in citizen-reported information to coordinate the use of social media in their communities. To understand possibilities for overcoming these barriers, we conduct interviews with emergency managers using scenarios describing the projective activities of community volunteers disseminating and monitoring social media. We find that coordinating social media use in communities requires alignments with local incident management systems and, in particular, existing sociotechnical infrastructure for managing citizen-reported information. These alignments open limited roles for community volunteers, notably coordinating the redistribution of official information; and stand to reshape the workflows and infrastructures of incident management systems by pushing emergency dispatchers to proactively process indirect reports of incidents obtained on social media, and integrate tools that can access hyperlocal data, curate incident and situational reports, and facilitate sensemaking among officials confronted with multiple information sources. |
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