"Beacons of hope" in decentralized coordination: learning from on-the-ground medical twitterers during the 2010 Haiti earthquake

  • Authors:

  • Aleksandra Sarcevic;Leysia Palen;Joanne White;Kate Starbird;Mossaab Bagdouri;Kenneth Anderson

  • Affiliations:

  • Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA;University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA;University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA;University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA;University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA;University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We examine the public, social media communications of 110 emergency medical response teams and organizations in the immediate aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. We found the teams through an inductive analysis of Twitter communications acquired over the three-week emergency period from 89,114 Twitterers. We then analyzed the teams' Twitter streams, as well as all digital media they generated and pointed to in their streams - blog posts, photographs, videos, status updates and field reports - to understand the medical coordination challenges they faced from pre-deployment readiness to on-the-ground action. Here we identify opportunities for improving coordination in a decentralized and distributed environment where staffing, disease trajectories, and other circumstances rapidly change. We extrapolate from these findings to theorize about how "beaconing" behavior is a sign of latent potential for coordination upon which mechanisms of coordination can capitalize.