Data that Matter: Opportunities in Crisis Informatics Research

Social computing tools can play a remarkable and transformational role in the way society responds to mass emergencies and disasters. By considering the self-organizing features of on-line human interaction, and augmenting that with socio-behavioral knowledge about how people truly respond in disaster, we are better equipped to design for new socio-technical futures. Crisis informatics as a research area addresses socio- technical concerns in large-scale emergency response. Specifically, this presentation will address the issue of deploying social computing solutions "on the ground" and how classic scientific methods are rarely an appropriate frame to impose for judging their quality. Other scientific approaches must be employed to transform the idea of the testing ground into the “design ground” while achieving the first-order goal of helping others.