Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science Conference
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In an increasingly global society and on a planet experiencing effects of climate change, large-scale emergencies both instigated by humans and arising from nature can devastate human life and our tightly- woven social fabric. With a promise of improved warning and coordination, a prevailing hope is that information and communication technology (ICT) can help reduce the impacts of large-scale disruptions, including political crises, natural disasters, pandemics, and terrorist threats. Much of the focus of development has been on the formal emergency response effort. However, social computing is changing the way we understand information distribution. By viewing the citizenry as a powerful, self-organizing, and collectively intelligent force, ICT is now playing a remarkable and transformational role in the way society responds to mass emergencies and disasters. Furthermore, this view of a civil society that can be augmented by ICT is based on social and behavioral knowledge about how people truly respond in disaster, rather than on simplified and mythical portrayals of people unable to help themselves [2]. Indeed, long before the advent of widely available social computing platforms, research has shown that disaster victims themselves are the true first responders, frequently acting on the basis of knowledge not available to officials [1, 3, 6]. We argue that this transformative view is critical to our global future: When large-scale emergencies happen, there is often no way to survive it in practical terms unless we rely on each other for help. The urgency and scale of many disaster events are such that no one, not even the most experienced and best technology- equipped responders' can rescue all victims or direct all people over the span of the event as to what the best course of action might be. Climate change and population migration to geographically vulnerable areas mean that naturally occurring hazards will exert increasingly extensive damage. Man-made and terrorist threats can also have greater potential to cause lasting damage to the social and built environment. It is instead necessary, through innovative ICT, to leverage the power of the collective intelligence of the citizenry to support natural instincts, which are to search for reliable information using any means possible to optimize for local conditions [5].