Social Media for Disaster Risk Management
The workshop will look at the needs and solutions in the use of social media for disaster risk management (SMDRM) from practitioner's perspective.
Key information
- Date(s)
- -
- Attendance type
- Online
Description
Social media have been described as a form of distributed cognition, a mechanism for understanding a situation using information spread across many minds. The interactions among people in social media are a form of collective intelligence, as they allow people to make sense of a developing event collectively. Social media users can contribute to creating a "sensor" for citizen-generated data that modelling or monitoring systems can assimilate during a crisis.
We think that social media constitute a growing data source to help improve response in the early hours and days of a disaster, when gaining situational awareness is critical and time-sensitive. However, social media platforms may not provide the functionality of summarising the information that is useful for crisis responders.
Workshops
In November 2020, our 1st workshop "Social Media for Disaster Risk Management: Researchers Meet Practitioners" identified some key opportunities and challenges. Practitioners, although widely recognizing the potential of accessing timely information from social media, outlined some critical challenges for improving its adoption during crises. In particular, validating such information and integrating it with authoritative information and into more traditional information systems for emergency managers. Also, the negative impacts of misinformation and disinformation need to be prevented.
Participants expressed their wish to continue the discussion towards identifying new directions for research and development of systems that can better serve the information needs of emergency managers. We've listened! Therefore this second workshop will aim at describing needs and solutions from a practitioner's perspective.
Related content
About the SMDRM Task Force
The mission of SMDRM Task Force is to identify, understand, and address the challenges for improving adoption of non-traditional social media data for disaster management by taking a collaborative approach between researchers and practitioners in disaster management to co-design solutions.
SMDRM Task Force is a consortium of researchers from universities and practitioners from disaster management organizations around the globe, facilitated by researchers from the Copernicus Emergency Services at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.
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