Since attempting to do a trip report after CHI was such a disaster, and since spamming twitter with N+1 tweets about an event may be annoying to some twitter folks, I’m going to try a kind of bloggy summary of the keynotes at SOCS 2013, the PI meeting for the socio-computational systems program at NSF.

This one is from Leysia Palen about understanding the use of social media, and ICTs more generally, in disaster response. Observations below (the first few are basically copied tweets before I realized I could do this, so they are pretty short).

— Dan

The sociology of disaster talks about the convergence of resources, information, volunteers; the “social media in disaster” question then might talk about how ICTs both add to and cut across these areas.

How to know you’ve found important online resources in disaster? Claim: people will mention them on Twitter, at least once, so if you collect Twitter, you get a pretty good sample of the world.

Leysia pointing out that SoCS/data mining proposals might need a substantial software engineering (or database) bit to support data management. This seems interesting as a way to build new collaborations and techniques both in the context of the kind of work lots of social media folks are doing.

Tweets for earthquakes to get human experience as well as magnitude and to supplement location. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/: “Did you Feel It” encourages people to report on their earthquake experiences. However, crowd tasks for disaster response can’t put people at risk: “Where’s the lava?” would be a bad app. More prosaically, broadcasting to people asking whether a road is open will lead to people converging there — possibly putting them at risk, and the agency at liability.

Now we’re looking at people posting to Twitter about disaster, more or less intentionally and annotated with metadata, in a way that would let us think of it as data. Or journalism. Can we use it in real time/for situational awareness? Can it become useful data for longer term planning and policy?

So there’s a question about how both “spontaneous” (info people create anyways as part of responding to the disaster for their own reasons) and “solicited” (agency requests for specific info; apps like Did You Feel It or the Gulf Oil Spill app) arise, what they’re useful for, how they compare, what are the ethical and legal responsibilities around them, etc.

A model: “Generative”, initial tweets create raw material and report experience and conditions, mostly from locals. “Syncretic”/synthetic tweets use existing material to build out insight (example: looking at flood reports to predict future flooding). “Derivative” material, retweets and URL posting, is a kind of filter/recommender system, one that really helps deal with the bad actors/bad info problem because the useless stuff tends not to be generated. (And in particular, “official” material tends to be retweeted more often than other material.)

Talking about distance from and details of disaster experiences reminds me some of the opinion spam detection work from Myle Ott, Yejin Choi, Claire Cardie, Jeff Hancock at Cornell: http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4557

The part of the talk about the recent Haitian disaster, and how online digital volunteers/digital activists built major bits of useful information infrastructure, including Haiti’s first really good maps (period), applications of them to the earthquake, and other infrastructure for distributing good, was cool. There’s a huge question, though, about how and when these things work, and why. Further, part of the story was that people had been gathering before the earthquake with a good of doing good, building capacity that was then ready to be turned toward an event such as the earthquake.

So, how do formal/existing organizations manage and work with social media? It’s hard, because on the ground they are so busy responding that social media is just not that important (not unlike, but more serious, than professors never updating their webpages because there is always something more important to do). Apart from questions of liability, and practicality, there’s also just a question of voice: what are they trying to accomplish and to convey by being online? One strategy they use is to correct misinformation, and allow likely-good information to go by (but not endorse it, for the liability reasons).

It turns out that it’s hard to go the other way, too: it was hard for social media researchers just to _find_ the accounts and locations of, e.g., police and fire departments that responded to Sandy, in order to look at their communication with the public. And, there’s a whole parallel discussion about internal use of social media in (and between) these organizations.

Interesting audience question was how do we measure the impact of social media activity and content on the ground? Answer: not well, pretty hard to do this. I guess you could look at retweets/likes, and someone else suggested using a summarization tool to help suss through tweets to find ones that are represenative/important/meaningful.

I wonder if it would be useful to look at parallels between microlending dynamics and disaster response dynamics. It’s clearly not a perfect parallel, but some of the social dynamics around convergence might be interesting to poke at. Likewise, the general crowdsourcing literature and infrastructure might be a fun connection.