#qldfloods

In a time of crisis or natural disaster, I could only imagine how people would be feeling and what would be going through their mind. 

What should I be doing? How can I stay safe? Who can help me? 

With all these questions going through their mind, as a media student the first thing I would do, is resort to is my social media accounts for help and I guess I’d try to remain calm????

Now days social media has particularly played a huge affect on the wellbeing of many people going through natural disasters or a crisis. To relate to Australia specifically, in 2011, in Queensland, there were the Queensland floods which left “200,000 people affected” (Creighton, 2016) and had the Brisbane City Council have to deal with “AUD $440 million which was spent on the recovery effort” (Creighton, 2016). The people of QLD quickly turned to their social media accounts and a hashtag, #QLDFloods was then made trending on Twitter with “35,000 tweets containing the hashtag” (Bruns, 2012). The hashtag was effectively used as a source of information and helped many of Australia’s Twitter users share information. Approximately, “50-60% of #qldfloods messages were retweets” (Bruns, 2012) which were to essentially share information and regular updates with their followers. 

I personally believe this is a great idea, and I’m glad that now if there were any times of crisis, it will be easy to access information. Although, now that I think of it, I don’t actually have a Twitter account and only a handful of Australians do as well, or at least it is common that Twitter “has a considerable churn rate of new users signing up but then never using the service” (Cowling, 2017) with only “2.8 million active users” (Cowling, 2017) in comparison to the 16 million active users on Facebook.

Well, luckily Facebook has also developed their own forms of crisis management. They have also gotten on board with the hashtag feature, similar to Twitter and have developed a Safety Check method, where users are able to mark that they’re safe to reassure family and friends on their Facebook account, who may have any concerns with their well-being after the disaster and will then be notified that they are okay and safe. 

As well as that, Facebook have also introduced a crisis management technique which makes people constantly able to access links to Aid websites, to promote donations and be able to help countries who have been affected and who may need the help or as much as they can get. In example, when the Typhoon struck the Philippines or when Japan was hit with the massive 8.4 Earthquake and Tsunami, Facebook had ads shared onto the top of everyones Facebook newsfeed asking for donations. 

Below is a great video I found that pretty much sums up how social media has been helpful in these times of need and in what ways.

Sources:

Cowling, D. (2017). Social Media Statistics Australia – January 2017. [online] Socialmedianews.com.au. Available at: https://www.socialmedianews.com.au/social-media-statistics-australia-january-2017/ [Accessed 21 May 2017].

Creighton, D. (2016). Queensland's 2011 floods by the numbers. [online] Brisbane Times. Available at: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/queensland-floods-2011-the-floods-by-the-numbers-20160112-gm4czk.html [Accessed 21 May 2017].

Week 8: Crowdsourcing

The practise Crowdsourcing is used to obtain needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and the online community (Merriam Webster 2014).

In recent years, the world has been hit with a tirade of natural and human-inflicted disasters. Take for instance the 2011 South East Queensland floods, Black Saturday 2009 and the earthquakes in Christchurch. When these disasters occur, information and communication become paramount to all involved. This is when the expertise of social media comes into play.

My own encounter with crowdsourcing came about during the 2009 Black Saturday Fires. I live in Gippsland and we are predominantly a farming area. This means that we are at high risk for bushfires. During the Fires council, CFA, police and even radio stations online profiles were constantly used to update the community with fire information. The information was shared around social media and it was used as a means of tracking affected areas as well as ensuring loved ones were safe. The CFA also had an app that allowed people to create watch zones for particular areas so they would be notified if danger came within a certain distance to that area. Every single fire season, we have at least one area in Gippsland go up in flames. So the need for accessible information in times of crisis is extremely important to the people in the area.

(This is a snapshot of the CFA fire app on Black Saturday, the area circled is my part of Gippsland)

Let’s take a look at the 2011 South East Queensland floods crisis where social media platforms Facebook and Twitter were detrimental in keeping people updated with information (Burns et al. 2012 p. 7). The twitter hashtag #qldfloods became the key coordinating mechanism for flood-related user activity (Burns et al. 2012 p. 7). The hashtag quickly became a viral topic as people were constantly retweeting any and all information that was being posted on Twitter. The constant retweeting and hashtagging enabled the information to increase its reach and allowed for easy access to relevant messages. The messages provided by emergency services were amongst the most visible due to the constant retweeting of their posts (Burns et al. 2012 p. 7). The great thing about crowdsourcing in this situation was the ability for people to stay updated on the crisis situation. When natural disasters like this occur, traditional forms of communication such as television and radio broadcasting can become non-existent due to connections being shut off. Whereas, social media can still provide a ground to share important information.

References:

Burns, A, Burgess, J, Crawford, K & Shaw, F 2012, #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods, Brisbane, pp.https://eprints.qut.edu.au/48241/1/floodsreport.pdf, viewed 2 February 2019 <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/48241/1/floodsreport.pdf>.

The South East Queensland floods in 2011 was a devastating natural disaster.  35 confirmed deaths and over 200,000 people affected.  Various social media platforms were increasingly used by media and emergency service departments to distribute and communicate information with the State as power went down and mobile devices were left standing.

According to research by Arc Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Twitter hashtag #qldfloods was used in more than 35,000 tweets and became the ‘central coordinating mechanism for floods-related user activity’ and these tweets ‘focussed predominantly on sharing directly relevant situational information, advice, news media and multimedia reports’ (Bruns et al, 2012).

This type of online sharing of real-time information in times of crisis’s fits into the broader definition of what is known as ‘Crowdsourcing’ – ‘the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers' (Merriam Webster Online 2014).

It is in fact a rapidly changing landscape the way in which media outlets and emergency services respond to, and engage with, the public in times of natural disasters and crises.

Media outlet ABC now incorporate social media as part of their emergency and disaster situation strategy through publishing key messages with links to online articles and other emergency services/agencies, as well as real-time crowdsourced information (Posetti et al, 2012).

Crowdsourcing has however, transformed into more than just retweeting and reposting emergency and disaster situations on social media.

Ushahidi, which translates into ‘testimony’ in Swahili, is an app which was developed in Nairobi to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election violence in 2008. Thousands have since used Ushahidi’s crowdsourcing tools to raise their voice, providing software and services to numerous sectors and civil society to help improve the bottom up flow of information (Ushahidi 2018).  The tool has evolved quite a bit, but initially worked by integrating SMS, 'Twitter, Facebook as well as updates from the web, so that a crowdsourced picture of an event unfolding over time could be depicted on a single map' (Ford 2012, p. 35).

Ford notes that although quite liberating in situations where there is little location-specific information available, or where an event covers a vast geographical area, challenges are posed in terms of verification of information and in many cases, misinformation, or inaccurate information being as damaging as no information at all, thus emergency services authorities are often reluctant to draw on crowdmapping (crowdsourcing) without systems in place to check and verify information (Ford 2012).

Although I agree to an extent regarding the reluctance of use by emergency services authorities due to issues around accuracy, I believe these innovations in technology for facilitating and improving the flow of information among communities is vital, particularly given the vast majority of society lives online. Perhaps crowdsourcing technology in times of crisies in the 21st century is what radio was in the years pre and post WWII.

References

Bruns, A, Burgess, J, Crawford, K & Shaw, F 2012, ‘#qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods’, Arc Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, pp. 7-10, viewed 26 September 2018, <http://www.cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf>

Creighton, D, 2016, ‘Queensland floods 2011, The floods by the numbers’, The Brisbane Times, 12 January, viewed 29 January 2019, <https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/queensland-floods-2011-the-floods-by-the-numbers-20160112-gm4czk.html>

Ford, H 2012, 'Crowd Wisdom', Index on Censorship, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 33-39

Postetti, J & Lo, P 2012, ‘The Twitterisation of ABCs Emergency & Disaster Communication’, Australian Journal of Emergency Management, Vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 34-39

Ushahidi, 2019, ‘About Ushahidi’, Ushahidi, viewed 29 January 2019, ·         <https://www.ushahidi.com/about>

Images

https://twitter.com/hashtag/qldfloods

https://giphy.com/gifs/vulture-xTiTnhXjLyayuvu3hm

https://www.ushahidi.com/

The emergence and growing shift of society forming digital communities has greatly shaped the effectiveness of crowdsourcing. Accessing digital technologies such as social media and other online platforms have been pivotal to this success. In times of crisis, individuals and organizations have used these mediums as a way to reach the most amount of users, or digital citizens, as possible. The success of crowdsourcing can be attributed to several central factors; the most prominent being immediacy. Analyzing this factor reveals the importance digital communities have had in effective crowdsourcing scenarios.

Modern crowdsourcing has successfully accessed digital platforms and social media; effectively removing all barriers that interfered with connectedness. Crowdsourcing leverages social media and online platforms capabilities to attain information and use it for a greater purpose (Rahman & Yadav 2016). Merriam Webster Online (2018) also describes the process as a way of obtaining information and other content from online communities, rather than via traditional methods like inhouse or company research. This method of gathering information has increased the speed in which content is received, which can be seen as an effective asset in times of crisis. Where traditional news broadcasts may take an entire day to reach information and report on it, accessing crowdsourced content allows immediate coverage. Recent research suggests that crowdsourced information, with the assistance of social media and online platforms, has the ability to reach millions of eyes within minutes (Koswatte, McDougall & Liu 2015). In disaster situations like floods, bushfires, and tsunamis, this can be a crucial tool in providing assistance and targeting areas in need.

During the 2011 Queensland Floods Twitter posts, featuring the #qldfloods hashtag, were an effective tool in gathering disaster information. Tweets spiked up to 1100 entries per hour during the event and had a continued presence over the days following (Bruns, Burgess, Crawford & Shaw 2012). This amount of information and the speed it was delivered greatly impacted disaster relief organisations ability to act on the situation, and the comprehensiveness of news coverage (Bruns et. al 2012). Whilst this example displays the effective use of Twitter for crowdsourcing information in times of crisis, many other social media platforms allow for this type of immediacy. The effectiveness greatly relies on the formation of digital communities and the increasing use of social media. Siapera (2012) suggests that society has a necessity to share information. This need is exploited in crowdsourcing events for positive effects. Crowdsourcing effectively access digital technologies to gather information in times of crisis.

Images that detail the disaster of the 2011 Queensland Floods can be found here

References Bruns, A, Burgess, J, Crawford, K & Shaw, F 2012, #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods, Arc Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, viewed 19 June 2018, <http://www.cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf>.

Koswatte, S, McDougall, K, Liu, X 2015, ‘SDI and crowdsourced information management automation for disaster management’, Survey Review, Taylor and Francis, United Kingdom, pp. 307 – 315.

Merriam Webster Online 2018, 'crowdsourcing entry', viewed 19 June 2018,<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crowdsourcing>.

Rahman, Z, Yadav, M 2016, ‘The social role of social media: The case of Chennai rains 2015’, Social Network Analysis and Mining, Springer, Berlin, pp. 1 – 12.

The term crowdsourcing means work being done by a “crowd”. It’s a sourcing model to obtain services, ideas, or content by gaining contributions from a large group of people, typically over the internet (jon 2017). With today’s crowdsourcing technology is very important as it makes it possible to include an even larger group of people (jon 2017). It reminds me of the saying “two heads are better than one”, because you have numerous people offering their best ideas, skills and support which will be superior content (jon 2017). Crowdsourcing and the use of social media is especially helpful in times of crisis, like during the 2011 South East Queensland floods. Twitter played an extremely important role during the crisis with its short messaging system broadcasted to its followers. The use of the hashtag #qldfloods quickly became the central coordinating mechanism for floods-related user activity and following emergency service pages such as Queensland Police’s @QPSMedia account became necessary (Bruns et. al, 2012, pp. 7).

I am from Brisbane and this was an extremely tough time for everyone. Houses quickly became surrounded by water, power and houses were lost. During the floods social media was the main way my family and I would source updates on what was going on around us. Each day we would wake up and check Facebook and Twitter to discover the new devastating news. I remember not being able to sleep at night because I was so worried about the water levels around our house and being constantly worried we would need to evacuate. During the floods our neighbour was pregnant and about to burst. Because of crowdsourcing and the updates posted by emergency services and locals our neighbour was able to escape the area and get to the hospital before the flood waters engulfed the city. My family was lucky because our house is on the high part of the street but not everyone in the street was so lucky. After our neighbour and her family left for the hospital water quickly started the creep up the back of her property and lap the back steps. The whole street banded together to move all their furniture to the top level of their house. Although the flood water came into the downstairs area we were able to save their belongings. After the water subsided there was a lot of damage done to my local area many houses were destroyed and our local shopping centre had completely gone under. People began posting to local community Facebook groups announcing where they would be cleaning up and the “mud army” came. I remember how truly amazing it was to see a community come together during a devastating time for many and help each other in that time of crisis.

This is a picture I took from just outside our street (Harrison 2011)

Reference List

Bruns, A, Burgess, J, Crawford, K, Shaw, F, 2012, ‘Executive Summary’, #qldfloods and @QPSMedia:

Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods, Viewed 28th May 2018. <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453.2259&rep=rep1&type=pdf>

Jon, 2017, ‘What is crowdsourcing and how important is it’, Out Source Force, Viewed May 29th 2018. <https://www.outsource-force.com/blog/what-is-crowdsourcing-and-how-important-is-it/>

At some point in our social media lives, I am sure we’ve all come across a post that has someone asking for money. Sometimes it’s a friend trying to cover the cost of medical bills, and other times it could be an organization raiding money for a national crisis. It then usually tends to lead you to a GoFundMe page, with their hopes of individuals contributing to crowdfunding their cause, no matter what their reason is.

Crowd sourcing has become to be an important factor in times of crisis and has been made easier with social media and the tools that are available through an online presence. The standard community-level communication channels, that are around already have to purpose and ability to distribute information during a time of crisis, and with the use of social media the channels are able to be adapted to a new form and continue to distribute information in times of crisis.

The term crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe, a politician from Minnesota. He defined it as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call” (Posetti 2012, p. 36).

The 2011 Queensland floods, was a key example of social platforms – Facebook and Twitter – playing an important role in this crisis and was also one of our main topics of this week’s lecture. The hashtag #qldfloods was used in over 35,000 tweets, that were sent during the disaster, and very quickly became an easy way for users to find information and used to “share breaking news of the latest event” (Liddy 2013, p. 1).

Twitter became a source for mainstream media both within Australia and overseas. Social media users around the world were sharing flood-related media resources. Whilst those close to the disaster were sharing their own experiences, as well as information and discussing the topic amongst other users (Liddy 2013, p. 1).

And now with how powerful social media has become – in particular Twitter – events can be organized more quickly, and with these events users are able to “find other who share their views and work together in disparate location to produce powerful sources of information” (Ford 2012, p. 33).

An example of this is the Manchester bombing, but more so the One Love Manchester, the benefit concert that saw Ariana Grande accompanied by Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Coldplay, Niall Horan and many more others come together to help raise money for the We Love Manchester Emergency Fund, which was established after the concert two weeks prior. The benefit concert raised more than 10 million pounds for the Emergency Fun, as throughout the performances, there were instructions on how to donate.

Both examples are important to show social media’s role in the crisis communication and emergency management. With these events still having similar ones happening to this day, it is important for regulatory bodies and emergency services teams have strategies that use both traditional and new communication technologies. With this it will help them to stay on top of what is happening during the times of crisis and pass on information that could save lives.

References:

Ford, H. (2012) ‘Crowd Wisdom’, Index on Censorship, pp 33-39

Posetti, J. & Lo, P. (2012) 'The Twitterisation of ABCs Emergency & Disaster Communication'

Gritt, E 2017, ‘Ariana Grande: ‘we had a totally different show planned’, News.com.au, 5th June 2017, pg1

The World Health Organisations deals with crisis regularly and in their Strategic Communications Framework brochure they state that effective, integrated and co-ordinated communication is integral to their work.  They further state that there are six pillars to their communication strategy whether through mass media, online or on the ground.  They are:

Accessible – that the right people can reach the information when and in a way that suits their needs

Actionable – that the audience will be moved towards whatever action is needed

Credible and Trusted – that the information is seen as credible and that the organisation is speaking with once voice

Relevant – that the information provided is relevant to the situation and the audience

Timely – that the organisation communicates what they know early and build the conversation themselves

Understandable – use of appropriate language specific to the audience and to build a story if necessary

I think these pillars of communication are important to this week’s learnings, as many of the examples studied proved that emergency organisations were either overwhelmed or left behind in the tidal wave of crowd sourced information resulting from a crisis.

Although communication during crisis situations is critical, the availability of communication channels and the credibility of the sources of information make this process complicated.  As demonstrated through the learning material, there are several channels that are available for communicating in a crisis, however the relevance and effectiveness of these channels and integrity of the information shared varied greatly.

Social media as a platform for sharing information both about what is happening and what resources are available to those affected by the crisis are proving to have value.  However, as previously mentioned the credibility of the information is paramount to the effectiveness of this process.  All the readings alluded to the fact that as channels of communication social media platforms were useful but would still require a lot of development, particularly in strategy and skills of the official bodies using them.

The Queensland Police proved that social media could be used effectively in both disseminating information and guiding the conversation through their Twitter account during the 2011 Queensland floods.  They strongly lead the conversation between Twitter users and the media in spreading the right information, sidestepping misleading or incorrect information and focusing on the issue at hand rather than sensationalism of the crisis (Bruns et al, 2012).

However, the involvement of various social media platforms during the Boston Marathon bombing proved to be disastrous.  Because the information dissemination was led by the public, false information flooded the social media, accusations and misinformation were rampant and the emergency authorities were not in control of the information flow.

As examined in the ‘Crowd Wisdom’ (Ford, 2012) article, the Ushahidi platforms effectiveness and relevance was dependent on cultural drivers of the population where it was being used and whether the people trusted it as a source of information.  Heather Ford further stated that verifying the information for accuracy was a critical factor and was depended on the teams who were at ground level, their experience at gathering data and evaluating it for verification.

All this proves that there are many potential uses for crowd sourcing of information in emergency situations, however, there are still many problems that need to be addressed, particularly the one of strategic development and ability of the emergency organisations involved.

Links:

WHO Strategic Communications Framework for Effective Communications Link: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/communication-framework.pdf

Wikipedia - Boston Marathon bombings in 2014: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombings

References:

Bruns, A, Burgess, J, Crawford, K & Shaw, F 2012, #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods, Arc Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, pp. 7-10, <http://www.cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf>, Viewed: 3 Jan 2018,

Ford, H 2012, 'Crowd Wisdom', Index on Censorship, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 33-39.

 Images:

Berke PR 2017, Why is Houston so vulnerable to devastating floods?, BBC News website, Image, <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41107049>, Viewed: 24 Jan 2018