New media technologies in crisis and disaster management : socio-technical factors of community engagement in response efforts

Abstract

The emergence of informal volunteers, helpers not affiliated with established emergency organisations, is integral to disaster response. It is integral both in the sense of being crucial for immediate help, and in the sense of being inevitable. The spontaneous and highly flexible nature of informal volunteers stands in stark contrast to the formalised, well-defined procedures of established emergency organisations. Where informal volunteers are motived by the perception of immediate needs for action, and employ fluent organisational structures that adapt quickly, established organisations operate through rigid procedures and command structures that have been trained, tried, and tested. Established organisations try to accommodate informal volunteers' readiness to help, by integrating them. However, they often operate on notions of volunteering that diverge from the highly emergent behaviour observed in recent events. The advance of contemporary information and communication technology supports highly emergent behaviour, in that it affords informal volunteers rapid and far-reaching means for self-organisation. Through a confluence of organisational differences and technological developments, the cooperation between emergency organisations and informal volunteers becomes a complex socio-technical problem. In the present thesis, I discuss computational support for overcoming this problem. Ultimately, I provide a theoretical framing for the interaction between established organisations and highly emergent efforts of civil society. Based on this framing, I derive design implications for computational support of coordination between these heterogeneous actors. This contribution addresses a gap in existing crisis and disaster research, in respect of socio-technical factors that inhibit cooperation, and the role that technology can play in overcoming them.