Use of Digital Volunteer Groups
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This document discusses how digital volunteers can help organizations like the Red Cross during disasters by monitoring social media. It provides examples of how the Red Cross uses digital volunteers, including having them monitor Twitter in 4-hour shifts to track trends, questions, and important search terms to improve situational awareness. Digital volunteers are asked to respond to questions they feel comfortable answering based on Red Cross resources. The document emphasizes that digital volunteers contribute over 1 trillion hours annually through mass collaboration and information management. It also discusses how organizations can foster and organize digital volunteer programs locally or globally through facilitated knowledge management and social networks with a focus on integrity.
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Use of Digital Volunteer Groups
- 1. Using Digital Volunteers Gisli Olafsson Emergency Response Director NetHope
- 2. Volunteers
- 5. Innovation
- 10. 1 Trillion Hours
- 14. @redcrosspilot The @redcross digital volunteers are on 4-hour shifts Role: to monitor questions about resources track trends keep track of important search terms related to disaster At the end of each shift, volunteers then provide valuable disaster operations reporting to improve situational awareness and best affect decision-making for American Red Cross operations and public information strategy.
- 15. @redcross pilot Preferred Capabilities: You have a personal Twitter account and you’re not afraid to talk with Red Cross stakeholders You’re adept at searching on Twitter You’re familiar with Red Cross relief efforts (or you’re willing to study CrossNet to become that way) Duties: Monitor Twitter for keywords like Redcross, “Red Cross”, #hurricane, #irene At the end of each 4-hour shift you’ll provide a short summary of the trends you’re seeing in conversations. Using your personal twitter account, you are asked to respond to any questions you feel comfortable with (the resources on CrossNet for Hurricane Irene are great for finding answers).
- 16. Mass Collaboration “Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success” Author Unknown
- 24. LOCAL OR GLOBAL?
- 25. Organizing
- 26. Facilitated Knowledge Management Collaborative Workgroups Social Networks
- 27. Integrity “Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching.” Jim Stovall
- 30. "It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.” Roger von Oech
Editor's Notes
- Webster defines the word collaboration as "to work jointly with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected". In the humanitarian world we have more focused on coordination than collaboration in the past. Webster defines the verb coordinate as the act "to bring into common action, movement, or condition". This has often caused issues dealing with other organizations such as the military and the government civil protection because there things are done through a "command and control" culture. The big issues however is that the mechanisms for coordination are breaking down as more and more organizations get involved and as the scale of the emergencies faced grows each year.
- Information Management This is an area I have been very involved in. The idea here is simple. Leverage the power of the crowd (the internet community) to help you perform very complex data processing and analysis. I have written a blog post about this here http://blog.disasterexpert.org/2010/12/outsourcing-crisis-information.html
- This great is key to effective humanitarian response. We must be trying at all times to do the right thing, even when we are not being monitored. But we can also leverage the age of networked intelligence to ensure that integrity is an overarching principle that everyone follows.
- Lets start with innovation.We need new innovative ways to approach to deliver the services needed in the aftermath of a disaster or crisis. We must be open to these new ideas, even though they may make some of the existing ways of doing humanitarian response outdated and may cause us to have to rethink the way our organizations deliver aid.