G.P. Jayasiri, & Raj Prasanna. (2023). Citizen Science for supporting Disaster Management Institutions in Sri Lanka. In V. L. Thomas J. Huggins (Ed.), Proceedings of the ISCRAM Asia Pacific Conference 2022 (pp. 77–88). Palmerston North, New Zealand: Massey Unversity.
Abstract: During 2016, 2017 and 2018, the country witnessed extreme rains which triggered flooding in several urban areas. The number of affected people by the 2018 floods was around 150,000 which shows a significant decrease compared to the events in 2016 and 2017. Several institutions provided their support via funding, relief, and rehabilitation mechanisms during these consecutive disasters. However, there are provisions which can further improve the performance of Disaster Management activities. Given this context, this study is carried out to investigate the application of citizen science concepts in several phases of Disaster Management in Sri Lanka. A scoping review supported by three case studies of floods was considered during the analysis. Limited participation of grass root level communities in decision-making and disaster planning, and issues related to data management are some of the main challenges identified in this study. Participatory mapping, Co-Design Projects, hackathons, and crowdfunding are some of the observed citizen science concepts which can be used to address the challenges and strengthen the Disaster Management activities in Sri Lanka. Further studies including interviews and questionnaire surveys were recommended to justify the findings.
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Xiao Li, Julia Kotlarsky, & Michael D. Myers. (2023). Crowdsourcing and the COVID-19 Response in China: An Actor-Network Perspective. In V. L. Thomas J. Huggins (Ed.), Proceedings of the ISCRAM Asia Pacific Conference 2022 (pp. 240–246). Palmerston North, New Zealand: Massey Unversity.
Abstract: Crowdsourcing, serving as a distributed problem-solving and production model, can help in the response to a disaster. The current literature focuses on the flow of crowdsourced information, but the question of how crowdsourcing contributes to physical disaster workflows remains to be addressed. Based on a case study of China’s response to COVID-19, this research aims to explore the role of crowdsourcing stakeholders and how they acted to respond to the outbreak. Actor network theory is applied as the lens to elucidate the roles of different heterogeneous actors. The preliminary results indicate that socio-technical actors activated, absorbed, associated, and aligned with each other to combat the pandemic. We suggest ways to augment the actor network to address potential future outbreaks.
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Therese Habig, Richard Lüke, Simon Gehlhar, Torben Sauerland, & Daniel Tappe. (2021). A Consolidated Understanding of Disaster Community Technologies. In Anouck Adrot, Rob Grace, Kathleen Moore, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2021 Conference Proceedings – 18th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 778–791). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Since the beginning of this millennium, there has been an increasing use of social media and crowdsourcing (SMCS) technologies in disaster situations (Reuter & Kaufhold, 2018). Disaster management organizations and corresponding research are increasingly working on ways of integrating SMCS into the processes of crisis management. In a changing technological landscape to address disasters, and with increasing diversity of stakeholders in disasters, the purpose of this research is to provide an overview of technologies for SMCS within disasters to improve community resilience. The identified and analyzed technologies are summarized under the term “Disaster Community Technologies” (DCT). The paper presents a classification schema (the “DCT-schema”) for those technologies. The goal is to generate an overview of DCT in a rapidly evolving environment and to provide the practical benefit for different stakeholders to identify the right one from the overview.
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Sofia Eleni Spatharioti, Sara Wylie, & Seth Cooper. (2018). Does Flight Path Context Matter? Impact on Worker Performance in Crowdsourced Aerial Imagery Analysis. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 621–628). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: Natural disasters result in billions of dollars in damages annually and communities left struggling with the difficult task of response and recovery. To this end, small private aircraft and drones have been deployed to gather images along flight paths over the affected areas, for analyzing aerial photography through crowdsourcing. However, due to the volume of raw data, the context and order of these images is often lost when reaching workers. In this work, we explored the effect of contextualizing a labeling task on Amazon Mechanical Turk, by serving workers images in the order they were collected on the flight and showing them the location of the current image on a map. We did not find a negative impact from the loss of contextual information, and found map context had a negative impact on worker performance. This may indicate that ordering images based on other criteria may be more effective.
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Sofia Eleni Spatharioti, Sara Wylie, & Seth Cooper. (2018). Identifying and Assessing Points of Interest through Crowdsourced Image Analysis. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 1123–1125). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: During a natural disaster, major damages to critical structures such as bridges or power lines can severely disrupt community functions for long periods of time, making the task of swiftly identifying this type of damage vital for response and recovery. However, survey flight paths are often designed with a main focus of complete and quick coverage of affected areas through aerial photography, which is then assigned to volunteers to aid in damage report and labeling. We designed a crowdsourcing interface that focuses on locating points of interest and assessing damage using images from survey flights. We tested our design using a disaster and a non-disaster application by recruiting volunteers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We found that the type of structure may cause difficulties for crowd workers in providing accurate assessments and that designing flights to also target structures may provide higher quality imagery for this type of task.
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