Collective intelligence in crisis situations

Workshop Programme

08:30 Registration

09:30 Introductions

10:00 Where to draw the line? Approaching a scale to negotiate in-situ civil involvement for the inquiry of crisis information (Amro Al-Akkad, Rene Reiners, Marc Jentsch)

10:30 Coffee

11:00 Discussion of 'Where to draw the line?'

11:30 A real-time social media aggregation tool: reflections from five large scale events (Jakob Rogstadius, Vassilis Kostakos, Jim Laredo, Maja Vukovic)

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Supporting transactive memory networks through information brokering (Tom Duffy, Chris Baber)

14:30 Working paper: Oslo 22/7 and London Riots (Shaun Perng, Amro Al-Akkad, Monika Buscher, Marén Schorch, Michael Stiso).

15:00 Coffee

15:30 Discussion Oslo/London Working paper

16:00 General Discussion

18:00 Close

19:00 Dinner

Participants

Tom Duffy txd983@bham.ac.uk

Jakob Rogstadius jakob@m-iti.org

Marén Schorch maren.schorch@uni-bielefeld.de

Buscher Monika m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk

Amro Al-Akkad amro.al-akkad@fit.fraunhofer.de

Volker Wulf volker.wulf@uni-siegen.de

Leysia Palen palen@colorado.edu

Gabriela Avram gabriela.avram@ul.ie

Link to Conference Website: http://www.ecscw2011.org

Link to reading group: http://www.mendeley.com/groups/1152081/mobilising-collective-intelligence-for-crises/

Acknowledgements

This workshop is supported by the Bridge Project (EU FP7, http://www.sec-bridge.eu), the Citizens Transforming Society: Tools for Change (CaTalyST) Project (EPSRC, UK), Next Generation Resilience Project 'DFuse' (EPSRC) and the Communicating Disasters Programme at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, ZiF (http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/ZIF/FG/2010CommunicatingDisaster/), Bielefeld University, Germany.

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CSCWSmart? Collective Intelligence and CSCW in Crisis Situations CfP

24th September 2011, European Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference (ECSCW 2011), 24-28 September 2011, Aarhus, Denmark

Contact: m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk

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Description: Crisis situations engender intensive information flows and need for collaboration not only between official and non-governmental emergency response agencies and the media, but also amongst members of the public. People affected by earthquakes, fires, floods, violence or slow motion disasters such as climate change or soil erosion, their colleagues, friends and relatives, and those who may have helpful knowledge increasingly use social media (Facebook, Twitter) to communicate and make sense of events, and to work together to respond to the situation. This one day workshop focuses on one particular phenomenon of social media use in crises: 'collective intelligence'.

Collective intelligence is an ambiguous and highly productive, but also potentially treacherous concept. On the one hand, the notion can highlight positive social innovation, including the collective, 'crowdsourced' mobilisation and production of intelligence about complex problems (Zwass 2010), new 'means for knowing what we are doing as a group' (Levy 1997, Malone & Klein 2007, Connected Environments, Cambell 2008, Goldman 2009), or new distributed problem-solving capabilities that are 'best understood as emergent and collective rather than orchestrated' (Vieweg et al 2007). On the other hand, the concept can mask problematic tendencies. Informational practices and content in social media can fuel confusion in crisis situations, spread simplistic messages with highly affective charge, they can be manipulated - maliciously, or by the media or organisations seeking to maximise donations, indeed - far from being emergent and self-organising - some forms of collective intelligence in crisis may be the result of 'puppetmastering' to take a term from discussions about totalitarian tendencies in gaming (McGonigal 2006). Alternatively, sensitive orchestration of public informational practices may open up new, genuinely collaborative opportunities for public engagement in crisis response (e.g. Rogstadius et al. 2011, Starbird 2011, Heinzelman and Waters 2009, RDTN, SAHANA, Ushahidi,) and provide professionals with new resources, resonating with experiences in citizen science (Hemment et al 2010).

This workshop seeks to discuss how members of the public and professionals in emergency response currently use social media to collaborate in crises. The boundaries between collaborative professional and volunteer work are blurred here. Exploiting the evocative ambiguity of the notion of 'collective intelligence', we explore examples of real world practices. Longer term aims are to establish an overview of relevant research, to debate opportunities and challenges for design and to identify needs for new research. Questions might include:

• Are there historical precedents/precursors?
• How is collective intelligence (CI) done in practice? What forms does it take?
• Are different forms of CI associated with different kinds of complex problems?
• What are intended and unintended consequences?
• How do collective intelligence practices evolve over the life-span of a crisis?
• How does bottom-up collective intelligence integrate with top-down crisis interventions by governments and NGOs?

Submissions: We invite submission of (working) papers, up to 15 pages. We're happy to receive a range of different lengths of papers, so anything from 3-15 pages would be fine. All contributions must be formatted in strict accordance with the ECSCW formatting instructions (author kits and paper templates are available for Word, PDF, and LaTeX). Please submit a PDF to m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk. A maximum of 30 participants can be accepted.

Important Dates

• 1st June 2011 Deadline for paper sumissions
• 15th June 2011 Notification of decision
• 28th June 2011Early Bird Registration ends*
• 1st September 2011 Background readings, draft papers and videos** in a wiki
• 23rd September 2011 Dinner in town for those already here

* Please note that registration is for the full conference.

** From a previous workshop at ZiF Bielefeld, a range of resources may be available, including video presentations:

Social media challenges from the perspective of professional responders - Jonas Landgren (IT University, Gothenburg, Sweden)

Communication, Coordination, and Collective Action - David Gurzick (Hood College, USA)

Crisis Informatics -Leysia Palen (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA)

Connecting emergency management and public use of Twitter in crisis situations -Irina Shklovski (IT University, Copenhagen)

References

Campbell, A. T., Eisenman, S. B., Lane, N. D., Miluzzo, E., Peterson, R. A., Lu, H. Zheng, X. Musolesi, M., Fodor, K., Ahn, G-S. (2008). The Rise of People-Centric Sensing, IEEE Internet Computing, pp. 12-21, July/August, 2008

Connected Environments http://www.connectedenvironments.com/

Gurzick, D., White, K.F., Lutters, W.G., Landry, B.M., Dombrowski, C. and Kim, J.Y. (2011). Designing the future of collaborative workplace systems: lessons learned from a comparison with alternate reality games. In Proceedings of the 2011 iConference (iConference '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 174-180. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1940761.1940785

Goldman, J., Shilton, K., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Hansen, M., Ramanthan, N., Reddy, S., Samanta, V., Srivastava, M., West. R. (2009). Participatory Sensing: A citizen-powered approach to illuminating the patterns that shape our world. Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, May 2009.

Haque Design and Research http://www.haque.co.uk/pachube.php

Heinzelman, J. and Waters, C, (2009). Crowdsourcing Crisis Information in Disaster-Affected Haiti. United States Institute of Peace. http://www.usip.org/publications/crowdsourcing-crisis-information-in-disaster-affected-haiti

Hemment, D., Ellis, R., Wynne, B. (2011) Participatory Mass Observation and Citizen Science. Leonardo Transactions Vol. 44, No. 1, Pages 62-63. MIT Press

Levy, P. (1997) Collective Intelligence. Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace. Translated by R. Bononno. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

Malone, T.W. and Klein, M. (2007) Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Global Climate Change. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.3.15

McGonigal, J. (2006) The Puppetmaster Problem: Design for real world, mission based gaming. In Harrigan, P. and Wardrip-Fruin, N. (Eds) Second Person. Cambridge: MIT Press: 251-264.

Palen, L., S. Vieweg, J. Sutton, S.B. Liu & A. Hughes (2007) Proceedings of the Third International Conference on E-Social Science, Ann Arbor, MI, Oct 7-9, 2007. http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/palen_papers/palen-crisisinformatics.pdf

RDTN http://www.rdtn.org/

Rogstadius, J., Kostakos, V., Laredo, J., Vukovic, M. (2011) Towards Real-time Emergency Response using Crowd Supported Analysis of Social Media. CHI 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation. http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/

SAHANA http://www.crowdsourcing.org/site/sahana/wwwsahanafoundationorg/3293

Starbird, K. Digital Volunteerism During Disaster: Crowdsourcing Information Processing. (2011) CHI 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation. http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/

Ushahidi http://www.ushahidi.com/

Vieweg, S., L. Palen, S. Liu, A. Hughes, J. Sutton (2008). Collective Intelligence in Disaster: An Examination of the Phenomenon in the Aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech Shooting. Proceedings of the 5th International ISCRAM Conference, Washington DC, USA, May 2008.

Zwass, V. (2010) Series Editor's introduction. Van De Walle, B., Turoff, M., Hiltz, S.R. (Eds.) Information Systems for Emergency Management. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, ix-xii.

Organisers Matthias Betz1, Monika Büscher2, Rebecca Ellis3, Maria Angela Ferrario4, Gerd Kortuem4, Marén Schorch5, Jon Whittle4, Andreas Zimmerman1

1. Fraunhofer Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik, FIT, Germany
2. Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK
3. Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK
4. Computing Department, Lancaster University, UK
5. Research Group 'Communicating Disasters', Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies ZiF, Bielefeld University, Germany

{m.buscher, r.ellis, m.ferrario, g.kortuem, j.whittle}@lancaster.ac.uk; maren.schorch@uni-bielefeld.de; {andreas.zimmermann; matthias.betz}@fit.fraunhofer.de