Abstract: This paper describes the use of a previously established qualitative coding scheme developed through a design workshop with public safety professionals, and applied the schema to social media data collecting during crises. The intention of applying this scheme to existing crisis datasets was to acquire training data for machine learning. Applying the coding scheme to social media data revealed that additional subcategories of the coding scheme are necessary to satisfy information requirements necessary to dispatch first responders to an incident. The coding scheme was refined and adapted into a set of instructions for qualitative coders on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The contribution of this work is a coding scheme that is more directly related to the information needs of public safety professionals. Implications of early results using the refined coding scheme are discussed in terms of proposed automated methods to identify actionable information for dispatch of first responders during emergency incidents.

Abstract: Crisis informatics researchers have taken great interest in methods to identify information relevant to crisis events posted by digital bystanders on social media. This work codifies the information needs of emergency dispatchers and first responders as a method to identify actionable information on social media. Through a design workshop with public safety professionals at a Public-Safety Answering Point (PSAP) in the United States, we develop a set of information requirements that must be satisfied to dispatch first responders and meet their immediate situational awareness needs. We then present a manual coding scheme to identify information satisfying these requirements in social media posts and apply this scheme to fictitious tweets professionals propose as actionable information to better assess ways that this information may be communicated. Finally, we propose automated methods from previous literature in the field that can be used to implement these methods in the future.

Abstract: Stakeholder perspectives on crisis management provide a useful descriptive framework for analyzing crises and making crisis narratives. However, their actionability for crisis management, i.e. possibility to use stakeholder management models into operational crisis management processes, remains an under-investigated question. The purpose of this article is to discuss the operational value of stakeholder frameworks for crisis management. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a successful crisis management process in a public transportation company, we investigate the activities set up by the crisis cell to manage internal and external stakeholders during the crisis. In our case, successful stakeholder management relied on: 1) good diagnosis capabilities for the design of an appropriate corporate positioning; 2) an ability to manage coherently a set of emerging and heterogeneous issues involving stakeSholders ; 3) the capacity to set up a tightly coupled form of organization, involving both crisis cell members and various anchorage points, i.e. specific actors involved in the project before the crisis, who were already in contact with key stakeholders as part of their day-to-day activities. We then discuss the practical and theoretical implications of this analysis and the potential value stakeholder perspectives for crisis management.