This document discusses using a humanitarian informatics approach to facilitate cooperation between citizens and organizational decision makers during crisis situations. It proposes mining and managing social data generated by citizens to address organizations' information needs and challenges of articulation and awareness. Specifically, it involves extracting, classifying, and modeling social data to provide actionable information aligned with organizations' process-driven needs for decision making during disasters and other humanitarian efforts. The approach aims to leverage citizens' massive social media data generation to help organizations that have more defined roles and information needs but less direct access to data.

1. Humanitarian Informatics Approach to
Cooperation between Citizens &
Organizational Decision Makers
Hemant Purohit
Humanitarian Informatics Lab, Information Sciences and Technology
1
@hemant_pt
CADMICS-2016
‘Collaboration and Decision Making in Crisis Situations’
Workshop at ACM CSCW 2016

2. 20th Century Connectivity
between Citizens and Organizations
2
@hemant_pt

3. 21st Century Connectivity:
Information Overload for Organizations
3
@hemant_pt

4. Scenario: Can Disaster Response
Organizations leverage Social Data at Scale?
4
@hemant_pt
20M+ Tweets
during #Sandy
HURRICANE SANDY RESPONSE: $60+ Bln in damage
Operational Implications of messages:
Does anyone know how to donate clothes to hurricane
#Sandy victims?

5. Operational Consequence: Creation of 2nd
Disaster for Resource Management
• Resource demand-supply mismatch
Hurricane Sandy, “Thanks, but no thanks”, NPR,
Jan 12 2013http://www.npr.org/2013/01/09/168946170/thanks-but-no-thanks-when-post-
disaster-donations-overwhelm
@hemant_pt
5

6. DISASTER
Event
@hemant_pt
Proposed Position: Mine and Manage Social Data
along the Coordination and Decision Process Needs
CITIZEN
Sensors
6
RESPONSE
Organizations

7. Proposed Position: Humanitarian Informatics
Approach
• Cooperative Information System Design between Citizens
and Organizations via Web (not limited to crises)
– Address Fundamental Challenges (Malone & Crowston 1990; Schmidt & Bannon 1992)
• Articulation
• Awareness
– Organization Characteristics
• Structured roles
• Pre-established communication, processes, and working norms
• More information needs, but less data access & resources
– (Emergent) Online Citizen Community Characteristics
• Unstructured roles and responsibilities
• No established norms
• No specified-given needs, but massive data generation & resources
7
@hemant_pt

8. Awareness
Challenges
(Malone & Crowston 1990;
Schmidt & Bannon 1992)
(what) INFORMATION EXTRACTION
(what) INFORMATION CLASSIFICATION
(what) BEHAVIOR MINING, etc.
DATA
PROBLEM
DESIGN
PROBLEM
ORGANIZATIONS CITIZEN COMMUNITIES
COOPERATIVE INFO
SYSTEM
Articulation
- Structured Roles
- Defined Tasks:
COLLECT Data,
Process, and
Make Decisions
- No Structured Roles
- No Defined Tasks,
but GENERATE
Massive Data
(where) LOCATION PREDICTION
(when) TEMPORAL MODELING
(who) ENGAGEMENT PRIORITIZATION, etc.
Process
Knowledge
Guidance
@hemant_pt

9. Conclusion
• Start from organizational information needs to create
information processing systems for leveraging new
information source of citizen communties on social media
• Interdisciplinary Research a necessity to guide information
processing, for maximal benefits of humanitarian informatics
• For decision making, Less is More! -- We need to focus on
actionable information aligned with process-driven
information needs of organizations
• Informatics approach not limited to disaster response, but
also applicable for information overload solutions of other
humanitarian organizations (e.g., gender-violence policies1)
9
@hemant_pt
1 Purohit et al. (2016). Gender-based violence in 140 characters or fewer: A #BigData case study of Twitter.
First Monday, Vol. 21, 1 – 4, January 2016 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6148/5190

10. 10
TWITTER: @hemant_pt
MAIL: hpurohit@gmu.edu
LAB: http://ist.gmu.edu/~hpurohit/humanitarian-informatics-lab.html
Acknowledgement: Respective image sources, and
Contact, Ack, and Questions?