Themes & Tracks
TRACK TITLE
Social Media and Community Engagement Supporting Resilience Building
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRACK:
The focus of this track is the design, use, and evaluation of information- communication technologies for enhancing public information and community engagement . We invite papers that provide rich description and/or evaluation of the design and/or actual use of Social Media for collaboration and/or widespread participation in any phase of crisis management, from initial planning and preparedness, through detection, response, and recovery phases.
TRACK OBJECTIVES:
The aim of this track is to encourage, showcase, and disseminate current research on how the use of Social Media can help in crisis management and response, especially for community building and thus contributions to increasing the resilience of communities. Secondly, an objective is to build the community of researchers on this topic.
TRACK EXAMPLE TOPICS:
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Studies of the use of social media in crises and conflicts, either for information sharing that can provide useful information for managers and citizens, as a pull technology, or for dissemination of information to the public as a push technology.
- Innovations in design or use of social media that solve potential problems such as issues of information overload, assessment of information trustworthiness, or ethical issues such as privacy.
- Identification and extraction of situational awareness and actionable information from social media and techniques for mining and near-real-time processing of social media data to enable early decision-making.
- Studies of crowdsourcing and other new practices such as the use of “digital volunteers” that engage the public and connect communities.
- Case studies and best practices on the use of social media for crisis preparation and response.
TRACK CO-CHAIRS:
Starr Roxanne Hiltz - Coordinating Track Co-Chair
New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
[email protected]
Amanda Hughes
Utah State University, USA
[email protected]
Abi Beatson
Massey University, New Zealand
[email protected]
Robert Power
Data 61, CSIRO, Australia
[email protected]
Starr Roxanne Hiltz
Starr Roxanne Hiltz is Distinguished Professor Emerita, College of Computing Sciences, NJIT. During 2010-2011 she held a «Cathedra de Excelencia» appointment at Carlos III University of Madrid, and since “retiring” she has also had many other visiting research and/or teaching appointments, including the U. of Salzburg, the U. of Agder in Norway and the Tecnun, U. of Navarro in Spain. Research interests currently include virtual teams and online communities, online learning, Emergency Response Information Systems, and social computing. She has been an enthusiastic supporter of ISCRAM since its first meeting; has been a track co-chair for the Social Media track at ISCRAM for many years; and was Program Chair for the 2014 ISCRAM meeting.
Amanda L. Hughes
Amanda L. Hughes is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Utah State University. Her research interests span human cooperative work, social computing, software engineering, and disaster studies. Her current work investigates the use of ICT attention to how social media affect emergency response organizations.
Abi Beatson
Abi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research (JCDR). She has a professional background and expertise in social media, specialising in crisis mapping and crowd sourcing technologies to prepare, mitigate, and respond to emergencies. Her research focuses on how people’s interaction with information and communication technologies (ICTs) can contribute to a resilient culture, particularly with regard to public information-seeking activities and the self-organising capabilities of disaster-affected communities.
Robert Power
Robert Power is a software engineer and project manager who has been with CSIRO since 1992. His research and applications interests focus on information management, data integration, spatial databases, web systems and natural language processing applied to social media content for situational awareness. He has worked in numerous domains, ranging from astronomy, privacy and security, water informatics, government services and emergency management.
