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Collaboration among Humanitarian Relief Organizations and Volunteer Technical Communities: Identifying Research Opportunities and Challenges through a Systematic Literature Review
Abstract
Collaboration is the foundation to strengthen disaster preparedness and for effective emergency response actions at all levels. Some studies have highlighted that remote volunteers, i.e., volunteers supported by Web 2.0 technologies, possess the potential to strengthen humanitarian relief organizations by offering information regarding disaster-affected people and infrastructure. Although studies have explored various aspects of this topic, none of those provided an overview of the state-of-the-art of researches on the collaboration among humanitarian organizations and communities of remote volunteers. With the aim of overcoming this gap, a systematic literature review was conducted on the existing research works. Therefore, the main contribution of this work lies in examining the state of research in this field and in identifying potential research gaps. The results show that most of the research works addresses the general domain of disaster management, whereas only few of them address the domain of humanitarian logistics.
... In recent years, in particular the use of information systems for volunteer management has gained increasing attention [63,27,29,36,58,50]. Although the use of such information systems is not the focus of this work, we assume that some of these are in operation during the response phase in order to provide information required for coordinating spontaneous volunteers. ...
In the aftermath of large-scale disasters, the exploitation of often up to thousands of spontaneous volunteers is crucial to meet the need for surge capacity which cannot be met by official responders. However, the coordination of spontaneous volunteers differs in several regards from that of professional and paid relief workers. Based on empirical requirements identified in interviews with the manager of a professional fire department, we suggest a multi-objective mixed-integer linear optimization problem with lexicographically ordered objective functions, which we refer to as spontaneous volunteer coordination problem (SVCP). Acknowledging that disaster situations are unavoidably linked to uncertainty, we consider uncertainty with a sequence of (deterministic) SVCP instances, where each instance depends on the solutions of previous SVCP instances. We conduct comprehensive computational experiments based on real-world data of a flood disaster that the fire department faced. From our computational results, we derive detailed implications for the fire department on how to use our decision support model. We also derive recommendations for all relief organizations which aim at adopting or adapting our model for the coordination of spontaneous volunteers in a broad set of disasters. Our implications include several recommendations for relief organizations in terms of performing extensive computational tests in order to parameterize and instantiate the generic model before its use during the disaster response phase; thereby we also address tasks to be executed during the preparedness phase of a disaster.
... Source: Adapted from: Tomasini and Van Wassenhove (2009) An effective relief operation helps to minimise the deadly need for the sufferers struggling in the affected area. Its efficiency is also reflected by the way it reduces the susceptibility of the affected population within the smallest possible time and resources (Salmerón and Apte;Tapia et al., 2011;Siemen et al., 2017). An early response can be to quickly build a humanitarian logistics team and start their rescue measures. ...
... En [46] los autores reiteran la necesidad de analizar estrategias de colaboración y coordinación entre sectores para fortalecer la cadena de atención de desastres, mencionando como crucial la integración de la comunidad. Frente a esto último, de manera tangencial en [47] se evalúa la potencial colaboración que podrían brindar comunidades técnicas voluntarias (VTC, por sus siglas en inglés) para recopilar, gestionar y proveer oportunamente información en apoyo a la respuesta a desastres (Ej. infraestructura y población afectada). ...
Los programas de asistencia social tienen como propósito brindar apoyo a la población vulnerable o en condiciones de pobreza, algunos de ellos a través de la producción y distribución directa de alimentos. Dada su integración con la población vulnerable, sus capacidades para movilizar carga, la amplia cobertura geográfica y sobre todo su orientación social, dichos programas podrían ser adaptados y preparados para servir como sistema de apoyo ante eventos disruptivos como los desastres naturales. Sin embargo, dicha adaptación hasta ahora no ha sido mencionada en la literatura. Este artículo propone la adaptación de un programa de asistencia social llamado Bienestarina, para la atención de un riesgo de terremoto en la Ciudad de Bogotá-Colombia. Para ello se implementó una metodología de 5 fases, con la cual se identificaron los elementos constitutivos de la cadena de suministro, se determinó un escenario potencial de riesgo de terremoto y el posible efecto del mismo sobre las capacidades de la red. La información obtenida fue el soporte para el diseño de los modelos matemáticos propuestos, a través de los cuales se evaluó un escenario de riesgo con variaciones en los parámetros de capacidades y demandas de asistencia humanitaria, obteniendo así un marco de resultados que permiten entrever la bondad de la integración de este programa en la respuesta a desastres. El aporte principal de la investigación es la evaluación de la integración de las capacidades de los programas de asistencia social para la respuesta a escenarios de desastre, y de manera accesoria la formulación de modelos matemáticos para la planificación de la respuesta considerando la vulnerabilidad de la infraestructura y el uso de concepto de “Zonas seguras” para la localización de instalaciones.
... Volunteerism in general and volunteer management in particular are vitally discussed in the field of disaster and emergency management, see reviews by Alexander (2010) and Whittaker et al. (2015) for an overview. In this regard, especially the use of information systems has gained increasing attention in recent years, see Auferbauer et al. (2016), Van Gorp (2014), Havlik et al. (2016), Horita and De Albuquerque (2013), Lindner et al. (2018), and Siemen et al. (2017), for example. In our paper, we focus on the coordination of spontaneous volunteers in disaster relief. ...
When responding to natural disasters, professional relief units are often supported by many volunteers which are not affiliated to humanitarian organizations. The effective coordination of these volunteers is crucial to leverage their capabilities and to avoid conflicts with professional relief units. In this paper, we empirically identify key requirements that professional relief units pose on this coordination. Based on these requirements, we suggest a decision model. We computationally solve a real-world instance of the model and empirically validate the computed solution in interviews with practitioners. Our results show that the suggested model allows for solving volunteer coordination tasks of realistic size near-optimally within short time, with the determined solution being well accepted by practitioners. We also describe in this article how the suggested decision support model is integrated in the volunteer coordination system which we develop in joint cooperation with a disaster management authority and a software development company.
During large scale humanitarian crises, relief practitioners identify data used for decision making and coordination, as critical to their operations. Implicit in this need is the required capabilities for analyzing data. Given the rapidly evolving systems of collaborative data management and analysis in digital humanitarian efforts, information scientists and practitioners alike are keen to understand the role of data analytics in response operations. Through a case study of a digital humanitarian collaborative effort, we examine the processes for big and small data analytics, specifically focusing on data development, sharing, and collaborative analytics. Informed by theories of articulation work and collaborative analytics, we analyze data from in-depth interviews with digital humanitarians. Our findings identify key practices and processes for collaborative analytics in resource constrained environments, particularly the role of brokering, and in turn generate design recommendation for collaborative analytic platforms.
Many scholars are not well trained in conducting a standalone literature review, a scholarly paper that in its entirety summarizes and synthesizes knowledge from a prior body of research. Numerous guides that exist for information systems (IS) research mainly concentrate on only certain parts of the process; few span the entire process. This paper introduces the rigorous, standardized methodology for the systematic literature review (also called systematic review) to IS scholars. This comprehensive guide extends the base methodology from the health sciences and other fields with numerous adaptations to meet the needs of methodologically diverse fields such as IS research, especially those that involve including and synthesizing both quantitative and qualitative studies. Moreover, this guide provides many examples from IS research and provides references to guides with further helpful details for conducting a rigorous and valuable literature review. Although tailored to IS research, it is sufficiently broad to be applicable and valuable to scholars from any social science field.
Full text available from http://chitu.okoli.org/pub/okoli-2015-a-guide-to-conducting-a-standalone-systematic-literature-review/
Crowdsourcing has become a quick and efficient way to solve a wide variety of problems - technical solutions, social and economic actions, fundraising and troubleshooting of numerous issues that affect both the private and the public sectors. US government is now actively using crowdsourcing to solve complex problems that previously had to be handled by a limited circle of professionals. This paper outlines several examples of how a Department of Defense project headquartered at the National Defense University is using crowdsourcing for solutions to disaster response problems.
Disaster managers depend on timely and accurate information for task-related decision-making in highly complex and dynamic environments. New data sources, like online social media provide an increasing volume of data that promises improvements in situation awareness. But it remains difficult to focus data collection on information needs and integrate relevant information back into decision-making. In this paper, we present the observation-aware Decision Model and Notation (oDMN), which connects tasks, decisions, information and data sources based on standardized models and notations as well as on domain-specific information models. The oDMN allows for deriving information requirements and determining the impact of incoming observations on relevant tasks and decisions. To demonstrate its usefulness, we apply oDMN to a case centered on logistics operations during the 2015 Nepal earthquake response. The results show that oDMN is indeed able to formally connect tasks, decisions, information and data sources, and thus support better decision-making.
Social media platforms have come into the focus of research as sources of information about the unfolding situation in disaster contexts. Incorporating information from social media into decision-making is still difficult though. One reason may be that the prevalent approach to data analysis works bottom-up, which has several limitations. In this paper, we adopt a top-down approach by means of a novel keyword-based method for identifying potentially relevant information in social media data based on structured knowledge of activities undertaken in a domain. The application of the method to the context of humanitarian logistics using four social media datasets shows its capability to identify potentially relevant information via reference tasks and to match identified information with decision-makers' activities. In addition, we offer a first set of domain-specific keywords to identify information related to infrastructure and resources in humanitarian logistics.
Large scale disasters are complex events involving many stakeholders. Despite the structures the national and international humanitarian system provide, still many collaboration and information gaps between stakeholders, levels of operations and phases in the disaster management cycle occur. In the recovery phase, communities are insufficiently involved and comprehensive knowledge about the affected environment is missing leading to mismatches between efforts of the different actors and the community needs and prolonged recovery trajectories at higher costs. The rapidly changing and new information environment consisting of mobile services, social media, social networks, crowd-sourcing and online communities offers new opportunities to engage with communities but also new challenges to stay abreast of all that’s communicated digitally. New collaborative approaches will be required to diminish these gaps. The EU funded COBACORE project develops a collaborative platform that facilitates the interaction between members of the professional, affected and responding communities. It helps to register needs, capacities, activities and acquire situational information by the whole, and provides facilities to obtain better matching of needs and capacities. Adoption and ownership by communities is essential and should be investigated by building and piloting a localized version of the platform. Such a localized platform should enable both digital and non-digital ways of interaction given that many disaster affected communities live in resource-poor environments. The platform can be used as well as a game for the responding community and professionals to improve their coordination skills.
This paper describes the evolution of recent work on using crowdsourced analysis of remote sensing imagery, particularly high-resolution aerial imagery, to provide rapid, reliable assessments of damage caused by earthquakes and potentially other disasters. The initial effort examined online imagery taken after the 2008 Wenchuan, China, earthquake. A more recent response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake led to the formation of an international consortium: the Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment Network (GEO-CAN). The success of GEO-CAN in contributing to the official damage assessments made by the Government of Haiti, the United Nations, and the World Bank led to further development of a web-based interface. A current initiative in Christchurch, New Zealand, is underway where remote sensing experts are analyzing satellite imagery, geotechnical engineers are marking liquefaction areas, and structural engineers are identifying building damage. The current site includes online training to improve the accuracy of the assessments and make it possible for even novice users to contribute to the crowdsourced solution. The paper discusses lessons learned from these initiatives and presents a way forward for using crowdsourced remote sensing as a tool for rapid assessment of damage caused by natural disasters around the world.
Recent research on automatic analysis of social media data during disasters has given insight into how to provide valuable and timely information to formal response agencies—and members of the public—in these safety-critical situations. For the most part, this work has followed a bottom-up approach in which data are analyzed first, and the target audience's needs are addressed later. Here, we adopt a top-down approach in which the starting point are information needs. We focus on the aid agency tasked with coordinating humanitarian response within the United Nations: OCHA, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. When disasters occur, OCHA must quickly make decisions based on the most complete picture of the situation they can obtain. They are responsible for organizing search and rescue operations, emergency food assistance, and similar tasks. Given that complete knowledge of any disaster event is not possible, they gather information from myriad available sources, including social media. In this paper, we examine the rapid assessment procedures used by OCHA, and explain how they executed these procedures during the 2013 Typhoon Yolanda. In addition, we interview a small sample of OCHA employees, focusing on their uses and views of social media data. In addition, we show how state-of-the-art social media processing methods can be used to produce information in a for-mat that takes into account what large international humanitarian organizations require to meet their constantly evolving needs.
Organizations that respond to disasters hold unreasonable standards for data arising from technology-enabled citizen contributions. This has strong negative potential for the ability of these responding organizations to incorporate these data into appropriate decision points. We argue that the landscape of the use of social media data in crisis response is varied, with pockets of use and acceptance among organizations. In this paper we present findings from interviews conducted with representatives from large international disaster response organizations concerning their use of social media data in crisis response. We found that emergency responders already operate with less than reliable, or “good enough,” information in offline practice, and that social media data are useful to responders, but only in specific crisis situations. Also, responders do use social media, but only within their known community and extended network. This shows that trust first begins with people and not data. Lastly, we demonstrate the barriers used by responding organizations have gone beyond discussions of trustworthiness and data quality to that of more operational issues.
Humanitarian logistics is a major factor for the success of humanitarian operations, making use of a broad range of infrastructure and resources in highly unstable and volatile environments. Due to the need for accuracy and timeliness, the information must be updated and related to the real variables of the affected area. In this context, volunteered geographic information (VGI), providedby local members of non-governmental organizations or individual citizens,emerges as an important information source. This paper presents a conceptual framework to link supply chain management (SCM) processes of humanitarian organizations with VGI, in order to assist the identification of information about infrastructure and resources that are needed by humanitarian SCM processes, and to supply better sources of information fulfilling the needs. The framework's central component is the Humanitarian Logistics Infrastructure and Resource Model, which can be used to encapsulate information and facilitate the cross-linking of SCM and VGI systems.
Emerging technologies provide new opportunities to humanitarian organizations for enhancing their response to crisis situations. Since the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, online volunteer communities have been activated to gather data and generate information products to improve humanitarian organizations' situational awareness and decision making. However, how and to what extent these information products influence the operations and organizational routines of the humanitarian organizations is a matter of considerable debate. In this paper we introduce an evaluation method to determine the impact of these new opportunities. Built on existing evaluation design principles for information systems, the resulting framework is used to identify the relevant impact factors in creating and using volunteer driven information products. Our results show that, despite the high response time and technical expertise, the organizational performance impact is inhibited by the limited embedding of volunteer driven information products in the organization. Using the presented evaluation tool the impact of other deployments can be determined and improved in a similar manner.
Science is a cumulative endeavour as new knowledge is often created in the process of interpreting
and combining existing knowledge. This is why literature reviews have long played a decisive role in
scholarship. The quality of literature reviews is particularly determined by the literature search process.
As Sir Isaac Newton eminently put it: “If I can see further, it is because I am standing on the
shoulders of giants.” Drawing on this metaphor, the goal of writing a literature review is to reconstruct
the giant of accumulated knowledge in a specific domain. And in doing so, a literature search
represents the fundamental first step that makes up the giant’s skeleton and largely determines its reconstruction
in the subsequent literature analysis. In this paper, we argue that the process of searching
the literature must be comprehensibly described. Only then can readers assess the exhaustiveness
of the review and other scholars in the field can more confidently (re)use the results in their own research.
We set out to explore the methodological rigour of literature review articles published in ten
major information systems (IS) journals and show that many of these reviews do not thoroughly document
the process of literature search. The results drawn from our analysis lead us to call for more
rigour in documenting the literature search process and to present guidelines for crafting a literature
review and search in the IS domain.
This paper provides an account of how the Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment Network (GEO-CAN) was formed to facilitate a rapid damage assessment after the 12 January 2010 Haiti earthquake. GEO-CAN emerged from the theory of crowdsourcing and remote sensing-based damage interpretation and represents a new paradigm in post-disaster damage assessment. The GEO-CAN community, working with the World Bank (WB), the United Nation Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) led the way for a rapid Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) utilizing remote-sensing based analysis as the primary source of information for building damage. The results of the GEO-CAN damage assessment were incorporated into the final PDNA framework developed by the WB-UNOSAT-JRC and adopted by the Haitian government. The GEO-CAN initiative provides valuable lessons on multi-agency collaboration, rapid and implementable damage assessment protocols under extreme situations for the disaster management profession, developmental organizations, and society. [DOI:10.1193/1.3636416]
This paper shows how Linked Open Data can ease the challenges of information triage in disaster response efforts. Recently, disaster management has seen a revolution in data collection. Local victims as well as people all over the world collect observations and make them available on the web. Yet, this crucial and timely information source comes unstructured. This hinders a processing and integration, and often a general consideration of this information. Linked Open Datais supported by number of freely available technologies, backed up by a large community in academia and it offers the opportunity to create flexible mash-up solutions. At hand of the Ushahidi Haiti platform, this paper suggests crowdsourced Linked Open Data. We take a look at the requirements, the tools that are there to meet these requirements, and suggest an architecture to enable non-experts to contribute LinkedOpen Data. 1
We report on the use of a team of trusted digital volunteers during the 2011 Shadow Lake Fire that occurred in the US Pacific Northwest to extend the social media capacity of a Type I incident management team. In this case study, we outline the tools and processes used by this virtual team to coordinate their activities, monitor social media communication and to establish communications with the public around the event. Finally, we discuss the potential merits and limitations of implementing a team of trusted volunteers and explore how this idea could be incorporated into emergency management organizations.
Remote sensing is increasingly used to assess disaster damage, traditionally by professional image analysts. A recent alternative is crowdsourcing by volunteers experienced in remote sensing, using internet-based mapping portals. We identify a range of problems in current approaches, including how volunteers can best be instructed for the task, ensuring that instructions are accurately understood
and translate into valid results, or how the mapping scheme must be adapted for different map user needs. The volunteers, the mapping organizers, and the map users all perform complex cognitive tasks, yet little is known about the actual information needs of the users. We also identify problematic
assumptions about the capabilities of the volunteers, principally related to the ability to perform the mapping, and to understand mapping instructions unambiguously. We propose that any robust scheme for collaborative damage mapping must rely on Cognitive Systems Engineering and its principal
method, Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA), to understand the information and decision requirements of the map and image users, and how the volunteers can be optimally instructed and their mapping contributions merged into suitable map products. We recommend an iterative approach involving
map users, remote sensing specialists, cognitive systems engineers and instructional designers, as well as experimental psychologists.
K nowledge differences impede the work of cross-functional teams by making knowledge integration difficult, especially when the teams are faced with novelty. One approach in the literature for overcoming these difficulties, which we refer to as the traverse approach, is for team members to identify, elaborate, and then explicitly confront the differences and dependencies across the knowledge boundaries. This approach emphasizes deep dialogue and requires significant resources and time. In an exploratory in-depth longitudinal study of three quite different cross-functional teams, we found that the teams were able to cogenerate a solution without needing to identify, elaborate, and confront differences and dependencies between the specialty areas. Our analysis of the extensive team data collected over time surfaced practices that minimized members' differences during the problem-solving process. We suggest that these practices helped the team to transcend knowledge differences rather than traverse them. Characteristic of these practices is that they avoided interpersonal conflict, fostered the rapid cocreation of intermediate scaffolds, encouraged continued creative engagement and flexibility to repeatedly modify solution ideas, and fostered personal responsibility for translating personal knowledge to collective knowledge. The contrast between these two approaches to knowledge integration—traverse versus transcend— suggests the need for more nuanced theorizing about the use of boundary objects, the nature of dialogue, and the role of organizational embeddedness in understanding how knowledge differences are integrated.
Crowd sourced crisis mapping technologies aggregate information from individuals, trusted networks of informants, and publicly available media sources for use in informing decision making and response. Deploying this technology in conflict zones introduces a new set of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hostile actors who have developed or adopted network surveillance and attack capabilities. Successful infiltration or compromise of these deployments can have a significant, negative impact on the lives of those reporting to and operating crisis maps. This paper identifies several fundamental vulnerabilities present in crisis mapping deployments and defines a set of best practices to defend those vulnerabilities from successful attack. The recommendations are adapted from established principles in computer and network security, combined with the authors' experience operating crisis mapping deployments in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Libya.
This empirical study of "digital volunteers" in the aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake describes their behaviors and mechanisms of self-organizing in the information space of a microblogging environment, where collaborators were newly found and distributed across continents. The paper explores the motivations, resources, activities and products of digital volunteers. It describes how seemingly small features of the technical environment offered structure for self-organizing, while considering how the social-technical milieu enabled individual capacities and collective action. Using social theory about self-organizing, the research offers insight about features of coordination within a setting of massive interaction.
Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has emerged as an important additional source of information for improving the resilience of cities and communities in the face of natural hazards and extreme weather events. This chapter summarizes the existing research in this area and offers an interdisciplinary perspective of the challenges to be overcome, by presenting AGORA: A Geospatial Open collaboRative Architecture for building resilience against disasters and extreme events. AGORA structures the challenges of using VGI for disaster management into three layers: acquisition, integration and application. The chapter describes the research challenges involved in each of these layers, as well as reporting on the results achieved so far and the lessons learned in the context of flood risk management in Brazil. Furthermore, the chapter concludes by setting out an interdisciplinary research agenda for leveraging VGI to improve disaster resilience.
Social media offers the opportunity to connect with the public, improve situational awareness, and to reach people quickly with alerts, warnings and preparedness messages. However, the ever increasing popularity of social networking can also lead to ‘information overload’ which can prevent disaster management organizations from processing and using social media information effectively. This limitation can be overcome through collaboration with ‘digital humanitarians’ - tech savvy volunteers, who are leading the way in crisis-mapping and crowdsourcing of disaster information. Since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, their involvement has become an integral part of the international community’s response to major disasters. For example, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) activated the Digital Humanitarian Network during the 2013 response to typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda [1]. Our previous research has shown that Canada’s disaster management community has not yet fully taken advantage of all the opportunities that social media offers, including the potential of collaboration with digital humanitarians [2]. This finding has led to the development of an experiment designed to test how social media aided collaboration can enable enhanced situational awareness and improve recovery outcomes. The experiment took place in November 2014 as a part of the third Canada-US Enhanced Resiliency Experiment (CAUSE III), which is an experiment series that focuses on enhancing resilience through situational awareness interoperability. This paper describes the results of the experiment and Canadian efforts to facilitate effective information exchange between disaster management officials, digital humanitarians as well as the public at large, so as to improve situational awareness and build resilience, both at the community and the national level.
Chapter 2 defines humanitarian logistics. Section 1 underlines the crucial role of logistics and supply chain management in the humanitarian context; it identifies the main categories of disasters and describes disaster-relief operations. Section 2 delineates the phases that constitute the disaster management cycle; in particular, it identifies the specific phase of the humanitarian logistics stream that demand agile and lean principles. Section 3 indicates the different key actors in the humanitarian system, and it describes their role in disaster relief, underlining the complexity of humanitarian supply chain relationships. The chapter provides the reader with a brief introduction on the key concepts of humanitarian logistics and supply chain management, and underlines the complexity of an emergency relief operation.
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) refers to the widespread creation and sharing of geographic information by private citizens, often through platforms such as online mapping tools, social media, and smartphone applications. VGI has shifted the ways information is created, shared, used and experienced, with important implications for applications of geospatial data, including emergency management. Detailed interviews with 13 emergency management professionals from eight organisations across five Australian states provided insights into the impacts of VGI on official emergency management. Perceived opportunities presented by VGI included improved communication, acquisition of diverse local information, and increased community engagement in disaster management. Identified challenges included the digital divide, data management, misinformation, and liability concerns. Significantly, VGI disrupts the traditional top-down structure of emergency management and reflects a culture shift away from authoritative control of information. To capitalise on the opportunities of VGI, agencies need to share responsibility and be willing to remain flexible in supporting positive community practises, including VGI. Given the high accountability and inherently responsive nature of decision making in disaster management, it provides a useful lens through which to examine the impacts of VGI on official authoritative systems more broadly. This analysis of the perceptions of emergency management professionals suggests changes to traditional systems that involve decentralisation of power and increased empowerment of citizens, where value is increasingly recognised in both expert and citizen-produced information, initiatives and practises.
This paper explores the processes underlying the ongoing endeavours to establish collaborative relationships between traditional, formal humanitarian and the non-traditional volunteer networks (VTC). In contrast with the ‘informational’ and ‘connectivist’ concerns, which dominate the crisis response literature, this paper synthesizes a perspective on multi-network/actor collaboration that is informed by STS and Practice theory studies. Thus, network-wide continuous efforts to establish ways of working between these two very different types of actors are conceptualized as complex collaborative re-orderings constituted of the inter-related practices of ‘reconfiguring’ and ‘fusing’. This perspective offers valuable insights into the dynamic processes of network transformations and changes, triggered by the co-emerging and coalescing endeavours of traditional and volunteer organisations.
In this paper, we examine the socio-technical impact that social media has had on coordination between professional emergency responders and digital volunteers. Drawing from the research literature, we outline the problem space and explore ways to improve coordination and collaboration between these two groups. Possible improvements include mediators, revisiting trust, emergency policy and process changes, a bounded social environment, digital volunteer data as context, and computational solutions. As the space matures and collaboration improves, we predict that professional responders will begin to rely on the data and products produced by digital volunteers. Volunteer groups will be challenged to mature as well, to develop volunteer management systems, permanent staff, data management practices, and training for new volunteers to ensure consistent response to professional responders as needed.
Knowledge differences impede the work of cross-functional teams by making knowledge integration difficult, especially
when the teams are faced with novelty. One approach in the literature for overcoming these difficulties, which we
refer to as the traverse approach, is for team members to identify, elaborate, and then explicitly confront the differences
and dependencies across the knowledge boundaries. This approach emphasizes deep dialogue and requires significant
resources and time. In an exploratory in-depth longitudinal study of three quite different cross-functional teams, we found
that the teams were able to cogenerate a solution without needing to identify, elaborate, and confront differences and
dependencies between the specialty areas. Our analysis of the extensive team data collected over time surfaced practices
that minimized members’ differences during the problem-solving process. We suggest that these practices helped the
team to transcend knowledge differences rather than traverse them. Characteristic of these practices is that they avoided
interpersonal conflict, fostered the rapid cocreation of intermediate scaffolds, encouraged continued creative engagement
and flexibility to repeatedly modify solution ideas, and fostered personal responsibility for translating personal knowledge
to collective knowledge. The contrast between these two approaches to knowledge integration—traverse versus transcend—
suggests the need for more nuanced theorizing about the use of boundary objects, the nature of dialogue, and the role of
organizational embeddedness in understanding how knowledge differences are integrated
Crowdsourcing is not a new practice but it is a concept that has gained substantial attention during recent disasters. Drawing from previous work in the crisis informatics, disaster sociology, and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) literature, this paper first explains recent conceptualizations of crowdsourcing and how crowdsourcing is a way of leveraging disaster convergence. The CSCW concept of “articulation work” is introduced as an interpretive frame for extracting the salient dimensions of “crisis crowdsourcing.” Then, a series of vignettes are presented to illustrate the evolution of crisis crowdsourcing that spontaneously emerged after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and evolved to more established forms of public engagement during crises. The best practices extracted from the vignettes clarified the efforts to formalize crisis crowdsourcing through the development of innovative interfaces designed to support the articulation work needed to facilitate spontaneous volunteer efforts. Extracting these best practices led to the development of a conceptual framework that unpacks the key dimensions of crisis crowdsourcing. The Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework is a systematic, problem-driven approach to determining the why, who, what, when, where, and how aspects of a crowdsourcing system. The framework also draws attention to the social, technological, organizational, and policy (STOP) interfaces that need to be designed to manage the articulation work involved with reducing the complexity of coordinating across these key dimensions. An example of how to apply the framework to design a crowdsourcing system is offered with a discussion on the implications for applying this framework as well as the limitations of this framework. Innovation is occurring at the social, technological, organizational, and policy interfaces enabling crowdsourcing to be operationalized and integrated into official products and services.
Humanity Road is a volunteer organization working within the domain of disaster response. The organization is entirely virtual, relying on ICT to both organize and execute its work of helping to inform the public on how to survive after disaster events. This paper follows the trajectory of Humanity Road from an emergent group to a formal non-profit, considering how its articulation, conduct and products of work together express its identity and purpose, which include aspirations of relating to and changing the larger ecosystem of emergency response. Through excerpts of its communications, we consider how the organization makes changes in order to sustain itself in rapid-response work supported in large part by episodic influxes of volunteers. This case enlightens discussion about technology-supported civic participation, and the means by which dedicated long-term commitment to the civic sphere is mobilized.
Social media are a potentially valuable source of situational awareness information during crisis events. Consistently, "digital volunteers" and others are coming together to filter and process this data into usable resources, often coordinating their work within distributed online groups. However, current tools and practices are frequently unable to keep up with the speed and volume of incoming data during large events. Through contextual interviews with emergency response professionals and digital volunteers, this research examines the ad hoc, collaborative practices that have emerged to help process this data and outlines strategies for supporting and leveraging these efforts in future designs. We argue for solutions that align with current group values, work practices, volunteer motivations, and organizational structures, but also allow these groups to increase the scale and efficiency of their operations.
This paper builds on the idea that private sector logistics can and should be applied to improve the performance of disaster logistics but that before embarking on this the private sector needs to understand the core capabilities of humanitarian logistics. With this in mind, the paper walks us through the complexities of managing supply chains in humanitarian settings. It pinpoints the cross learning potential for both the humanitarian and private sectors in emergency relief operations as well as possibilities of getting involved through corporate social responsibility. It also outlines strategies for better preparedness and the need for supply chains to be agile, adaptable and aligned—a core competency of many humanitarian organizations involved in disaster relief and an area which the private sector could draw on to improve their own competitive edge. Finally, the article states the case for closer collaboration between humanitarians, businesses and academics to achieve better and more effective supply chains to respond to the complexities of today's logistics be it the private sector or relieving the lives of those blighted by disaster.Journal of the Operational Research Society (2006) 57, 475–489. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602125 Published online 14 December 2005
Collaboration is a necessary foundation for dealing with both natural and technological hazards and disasters and the consequences of terrorism. This analysis describes the structure of the American emergency management system, the charts development of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and identifies conflicts arising from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the attempt to impose a command and control system on a very collaborative organizational culture in a very collaborative sociopolitical and legal context. The importance of collaboration is stressed, and recommendations are offered on how to improve the amount and value of collaborative activities. New leadership strategies are recommended that derive their power from effective strategies and the transformational power of a compelling vision, rather than from hierarchy, rank, or standard operating procedures.
Purpose
This paper aims to further the understanding of planning and carrying out logistics operations in disaster relief.
Design/methodology/approach
Topical literature review of academic and practitioner journals.
Findings
Creates a framework distinguishing between actors, phases, and logistical processes of disaster relief. Drawing parallels of humanitarian logistics and business logistics, the paper discovers and describes the unique characteristics of humanitarian logistics while recognizing the need of humanitarian logistics to learn from business logistics.
Research limitations/implications
The paper is conceptual in nature; empirical research is needed to support the framework. The framework sets a research agenda for academics.
Practical implications
Useful discussion of the unique characteristics of humanitarian logistics. The framework provides practitioners with a tool for planning and carrying out humanitarian logistics operations.
Originality/value
No overarching framework for humanitarian logistics exists in the logistics literature so far. The field of humanitarian logistics has so far received limited attention by logistics academics.
A taxonomy of literature reviews in education and psychology is presented. The taxonomy categorizes reviews according to:
(a) focus; (b) goal; (c) perspective; (d) coverage; (e) organization; and (f) audience. The seven winners of the American
Educational Research Association’s Research Review Award are used to illustrate the taxonomy’s categories. Data on the reliability
of taxonomy codings when applied by readers is presented. Results of a survey of review authors provides baseline data on
how frequently different types of reviews appear in the education and psychology literature. How the taxonomy might help in
judging the quality of literature reviews is discussed, along with more general standards for evaluating reviews.
In recent months there has been an explosion of interest in using the Web to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic
information provided voluntarily by individuals. Sites such as Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap are empowering citizens to create
a global patchwork of geographic information, while Google Earth and other virtual globes are encouraging volunteers to develop
interesting applications using their own data. I review this phenomenon, and examine associated issues: what drives people
to do this, how accurate are the results, will they threaten individual privacy, and how can they augment more conventional
sources? I compare this new phenomenon to more traditional citizen science and the role of the amateur in geographic observation.
A review of prior, relevant literature is an essential feature of any academic project. An effective review creates a firm foundation for advancing knowledge. It facilitates theory development, closes areas where a plethora of research exists, and uncovers areas where research is needed.
Im Laufe der nächsten Jahrzehnte wird aufgrund einer Reihe von Faktoren weltweit mit einer Zunahme von Naturkatastrophen und humanitären Krisen gerechnet. Humanitäre Organisationen werden in Reaktion auf solche Krisen aktiv und leisten humanitäre Hilfe. Ziel der humanitären Hilfe ist, das Überleben der betroffenen Menschen zu sichern und deren selbstständige Überlebensfähigkeit wiederherzustellen. Dabei kommt der Logistik bzw. dem Supply Chain Management aufgrund der komplexen Randbedingungen, unter denen diese Hilfe geleistet wird, eine Schlüsselfunktion zu. Obwohl ein großer Anteil des Budgets solcher Einsätze auf die Bereiche Beschaffung, Transport und Lagerhaltung entfällt, haben humanitäre Organisationen oft noch nicht die Bedeutung der Logistik erkannt.
Alexander Blecken untersucht in seiner Dissertation die Aufgaben und Verantwortlichkeiten von humanitären Organisationen und den Akteuren in deren Supply Chains bei der Planung und Durchführung logistischer Prozesse im Rahmen der humanitären Hilfe. Er strukturiert diese Aufgaben auf einer strategischen, taktischen und operativen Ebene und berücksichtigt dabei die Unterscheidung zwischen kurzfristiger Katastrophenhilfe und mittelfristig orientierter humanitärer Hilfe. Das entwickelte Referenz-Aufgabenmodell kann von humanitären Organisationen zur Prozessmodellierung und zum Prozessdesign eingesetzt werden. The past decade has seen an ever increasing number of natural and man-made disasters. The international community addresses the resulting humanitarian crises with concerted efforts and supports the affected communities in their survival by delivering essential goods and services ranging from food aid, water and sanitation services, to providing shelter and basic health care. Although logistics and supply chain management activities account for a large part of total expenditures in such operations, these have frequently not yet been recognised as key levers to improve effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian organisations.
Alexander Blecken investigates the tasks and responsibilities of humanitarian organisations and their supply chain partners when designing, planning, and implementing supply chain processes for humanitarian operations. He systematically presents the tasks of supply chain management in the context of humanitarian operations under consideration of both short-term disaster relief and mid-term humanitarian aid. A reference task model is developed which can be used by humanitarian organisations as a tool for process modelling and design in the areas of logistics and supply chain management. A number of supply chain processes illustrate the flexible application of the reference task model.
Guidance for Collaborating with Volunteer and Technical Communities
- L Capelo
- N Chang
- A Verity
Capelo, L., Chang, N., & Verity, A. (2012). Guidance for Collaborating with Volunteer and Technical
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Promoting coordination for disaster relief -From crowdsourcing to coordination
- H Gao
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- G Barbier
- H Liu
Gao, H., Wang, X., Barbier, G., & Liu, H. (2011). Promoting coordination for disaster relief -From
crowdsourcing to coordination. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Computing,
Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction (Vol. 6589 LNCS, pp. 197-204). College Park: Springer.
Crowdsourcing for Rapid Damage Assessment: The Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment WiPe Paper – Future Trends Proceedings of the 14th ISCRAM Conference
- S Ghosh
- C K Huyck
- M Greene
- S P Gill
- J Bevington
- W Svekla
- R T Eguchi
Ghosh, S., Huyck, C. K., Greene, M., Gill, S. P., Bevington, J., Svekla, W., … Eguchi, R. T. (2011).
Crowdsourcing for Rapid Damage Assessment: The Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment
WiPe Paper – Future Trends
Proceedings of the 14th ISCRAM Conference – Albi, France, May 2017
Understanding the information needs of field-based decision-makers in humanitarian response to sudden onset disasters
- E Gralla
- J Goentzel
- B Van De Walle
Gralla, E., Goentzel, J., & van de Walle, B. (2015). Understanding the information needs of field-based
decision-makers in humanitarian response to sudden onset disasters. In Proceedings of the 12th
International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Kristiansand:
ISCRAM.
Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies
- Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. (2011). Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in
Humanitarian Emergencies. Washington, D.C. and Berkshire, UK.
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. (2017). Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Retrieved March 17, 2017,
from https://www.hotosm.org/
From Crowdsourced Mapping to Community: The Post-Earthquake Work of OpenStreetMap Haiti
- R Soden
- L Palen
Soden, R., & Palen, L. (2014). From Crowdsourced Mapping to Community: The Post-Earthquake Work of
OpenStreetMap Haiti. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative
Systems (pp. 311-326). Nice: Springer.
Supply Chain Management Definitions and Glossary
- Cscmp
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https://cscmp.org/supply-chain-management-definitions
Crowdsourcing for Rapid Damage Assessment: The Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment WiPe Paper
- S Ghosh
- C K Huyck
- M Greene
- S P Gill
- J Bevington
- W Svekla
- R T Eguchi
Ghosh, S., Huyck, C. K., Greene, M., Gill, S. P., Bevington, J., Svekla, W., … Eguchi, R. T. (2011).
Crowdsourcing for Rapid Damage Assessment: The Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment
WiPe Paper -Future Trends
Proceedings of the 14th ISCRAM Conference -Albi, France, May 2017
World Disasters Report 2013: Focus on Technology and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention. Geneva: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
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About Disaster Management
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