Harnessing crowdsourcing in disaster response

Increasingly frequent and destructive disasters pose great challenges for the effective and efficient responses of organisations and authorities. Examples include the Haiti earthquake in 2010, the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

In the aftermath of a disaster, the information flow is overwhelmed with redundant, disorganised, and even false information, while flows of relief supplies, funds and manpower are disrupted. The unpredictability of events, panicked reactions and chaotic situations in the affected area urgently requires a rapid design and deployment of disaster relief supply chains.

The top-down disaster relief approach dominated by official organisations has shown clear inadequacies in terms of disaster resilience. However, many spontaneous and improvised relief activities initiated by individuals or groups emerge in the early stages, compensating for the lack or slowness of the official response to some extent. Internet technologies, especially the popularity of mobile communication devices, offer more possibilities for crowd involvement. Such internet-mediated, crowd-distributed, problem-solving efforts for disaster relief can be seen as a crucial application of crowdsourcing. The adaptability and flexibility of crowdsourcing make it a good fit for the complexity of disaster situations. Crowdsourcing mobilises a large and diverse community to provide situational awareness, emotional support and donations in response to disasters.

Although prior practices and studies have referenced crowd involvement, the term crowdsourcing has not been widely adopted in disaster contexts. This may be due to its newness as a phenomenon and, therefore, lack of validation and protocols. In addition, studies in this area have focused on crowdsourcing information using social networks as the medium and web users as participants. Nevertheless, questions remain concerning the role of crowdsourcing in coordinating supplies, donations, and other disaster relief supply chains and the obvious benefits for the efficiency of the disaster response of the way different stakeholders use crowdsourcing in disaster contexts, especially in collaborating with each other. At the least, addressing these questions is important to prevent the chaos caused by official interventions in crowd disaster response efforts.

My research will therefore aim to:

• Develop a comprehensive understanding of the role of crowdsourcing in response to disasters.
• Examine the perspectives of the different stakeholders involved in crowdsourcing efforts in disaster contexts.

To achieve these objectives, I will be focusing on two research questions.

Research question one: What is the role of crowdsourcing in response to disasters?

• I will first conduct an extensive literature review focusing on the crowd perspective and explore different crowdsourcing practices in disaster contexts to support the response efforts.

Research question two: How can crowdsourcing be harnessed in response to disasters?

• I will explore the perspectives of crowdsourcers at the grassroots and in organisations to understand how different actors at different levels use crowdsourcing to better engage in disaster contexts.