The Role of Social Media in Crisis Management

30th October 2014

In a recent video humanitarian technology thought-leader and Ushahidi-founder Patrick Meier made an important statement regarding the value of social media in crisis management, that information feedback loops are essential drivers for self-organisation. Social media plays an important role in creating such feedback loops in disaster recovery: providing new channels for affected communities to voice needs and concerns, and in doing so, enhancing the situation awareness of professional responders, closing the feedback loop and leading to a more effective disaster recovery.

The COBACORE project follows exactly that line of thought: creating novel information feedback loops throughout the post-disaster landscape in order to close collaboration gaps and enhance situation awareness. Ideally, better situation awareness should lead to better understanding of not only the needs of an affected community, but also its capacity to self-organise and self-recover.

However, COBACORE project research activities have also highlighted the fact that, with great information comes great responsibility on the part of the professionals – such as the responsibility to act only when and where needed. During the recent Future Security 2014 conference in Berlin, the former FEMA Deputy Director Richard A. Serino made the insightful observation that “we should not underestimate the power of the human spirit”, pointing the fact that professional disaster relief organisations often tend to discount self-organising capacities of affected communities, and worse yet, disregard the tremendous eagerness of communities to take matters in their own hands. In doing so, he highlighted the seemingly counter-intuitive danger posed by new forms of social communication technology: novel information sources with the potential to amplify the tendency of professionals to over-organise because of their improved information position. On reflection, this comment, and the complex issues that it raises, challenges us to think critically about the implications of the COBACORE platform as a new social communication technology for disaster and crisis management.

So, Patrick Meier is right to view social media as an important driving force toward more community-based disaster recovery, but his comments also challenge professionals and practitioners to rethink their role and not blindly absorb and adopt such technologies without further consideration. Social media and community-collaboration platforms, such as the COBACORE platform, bring the promise of great operational value, but only when professional organisations are open to adapt their way of working to a new norm: a true community-based and ‘bottom-up’ approach to disaster recovery that embraces the self-organisational capacities of the communities involved, and where professionals are committed to contributing their expertise where gaps arise.

Martijn Neef, Project Coordinator

Innovator, consultant
Networked Organisations Group (TNO)

martijn.neef@tno.nl