RAPID: The Role of Emergent Organizations in Hurricane Harvey Response

RAPID：新兴组织在飓风哈维应对中的作用

基本信息

批准号：
1760739
负责人：
Thomas Seager
金额：
$ 20万
依托单位：
Arizona State University
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2018
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2018-01-15 至 2020-12-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1760739&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
RAPID Role Emergent Organizations Hurricane

项目摘要

Disaster response has always included both formal organizations, such as the Red Cross, National Guard, and municipal police, fire, and emergency medicine teams, and informal groups, such as neighbors, families, and community or social clubs. In the case of Hurricane Harvey, however,new social media platforms allowed an unprecedented level of coordination among ad hoc or informal disaster responders exemplified by #RedNeckNavy and @CajunNavyRelief that blurred the lines between paid and volunteer responders. These emergent response organizations are typically characterized by fluid memberships, dispersed leadership, and unstable task definitions. While these decentralized attributes may be at odds with official responders, their grassroots, flexible, and locally-informed expertise represents an important source of community resilience. The increasing importance of social media in emergency response organizations presents a serious challenge to existing approaches to planning for and understanding resilience, because these organizations are not created through formal procedures, official assignment of membership, or legal entitlement. Rather, they are constituted through communication among individuals with shared goals. This research fills a critical national need related to disaster response by applying the military doctrine of "command and control" to examine the allocation of decision rights, patterns of communication, and access to information in the use of social media to organize the volunteer response to Hurricane Harvey. The research has the potential to improve the effectiveness of emergency response, thereby saving lives and hastening recovery from disasters. The goal of this project is to understand the role of emergent response organizations in mitigating disaster risks during the Hurricane Harvey relief effort. To achieve this goal, the research team explores the development and subsequent role of emergent, volunteer response organizations like #RedNeckNavy in the disaster relief effort. Such organizations were constituted by communication on social media platforms such as Twitter and Zello. The team uses a mixed-methods approach to understand how these organizations used social media platforms to establish three organizational dynamics that translated into successful disaster relief action on the ground: distribution of information, patterns of interaction, and allocation of decision rights. Such organizational dynamics did not exist a priori in regard to the hurricane. Each process was created and substantiated through members' communication practices. The research includes social media scraping, linguistic analysis, and data visualization tools to identify the most influential members of the online community and the ways in which the three dynamics listed above came into being and changed during the relief effort. Because the scholars also seek to understand how organizational members made meaning of events, the researchers combine quantitative data analytics with qualitative interviews, participant observation, and focus groups of the influential emergent organization members. The meaning making constructs and orientations present among emergent response organizations contributes to understanding how and why some organizations make meaning of threats and crises as debilitating, where others are capable of overcoming threats in favor of response and recovery. Given the leadership role of military organizations like the US Coast Guard, National Guard, and US Army Corps in response to natural catastrophes and the pervasive military metaphors which inform the culture of these organizations, the researchers adapt the military doctrine known as "Command and Control" to describe the levels of organizational maturity extant in social media-enabled emergent response organizations and to characterize their internal and external communicative practices, particularly as compared to those of the more formal, federal and municipal organizations present, such as FEMA and the Red Cross. The results of this research will contribute to improved response technologies and better integration of community-based, ad hoc, and emergent organizations with formal response efforts.

灾难响应始终包括正式组织，例如红十字会，国民警卫队和市政警察，消防和急诊医学团队，以及非正式团体，例如邻居，家庭，社区或社会俱乐部。但是，就哈维飓风而言，新的社交媒体平台允许#RedneckNavy和@cajunnavyrelief在临时或非正式灾难响应者之间进行前所未有的协调水平，从而模糊了付费和志愿者响应者之间的界限。这些紧急响应组织通常以流体成员资格，分散的领导和不稳定的任务定义为特征。尽管这些分散的属性可能与官方响应者矛盾，但他们的基层，灵活和不明显的专业知识代表了社区弹性的重要来源。社交媒体在紧急响应组织中的重要性日益重要，对现有的计划和理解韧性方法提出了严重的挑战，因为这些组织不是通过正式程序，正式分配会员资格或法律权利来创建的。相反，它们是通过具有共同目标的个人之间的交流来构成的。这项研究通过应用“指挥与控制”的军事学说来检查决策权，沟通方式以及使用社交媒体在使用社交媒体中的信息来组织志愿者对哈维飓风的响应中，通过使用“指挥与控制”的军事学说来满足与灾难反应有关的关键需求。该研究有可能提高紧急响应的有效性，从而挽救生命并加快灾难中的康复。该项目的目的是了解新兴响应组织在减轻飓风哈维救济工作期间的灾难风险中的作用。为了实现这一目标，研究团队探讨了#ReDneckNavy在灾难救济工作中，新兴，志愿者反应组织的发展和后续作用。这些组织是由Twitter和Zello等社交媒体平台上的沟通构成的。该团队使用混合方法方法来了解这些组织如何使用社交媒体平台来建立三种组织动态，这些组织动态在实地上转化为成功的救灾行动：信息的分布，互动模式和决策权的分配。这种组织动态在飓风方面并不存在。每个过程都是通过成员的沟通实践创建和证实的。该研究包括社交媒体刮擦，语言分析和数据可视化工具，以确定在线社区中最有影响力的成员以及上面列出的三种动态在救济工作中发生和改变的方式。由于学者们还试图了解组织成员如何对事件的意义，因此研究人员将定量数据分析与定性访谈，参与者观察以及有影响力的新兴组织成员的焦点小组相结合。新兴响应组织之间存在的构造和方向的含义有助于理解某些组织如何以及为什么将威胁和危机的意义视为令人衰弱的含义，而其他组织则能够克服威胁而支持响应和恢复。鉴于美国海岸警卫队，国民警卫队和美国陆军等军事组织的领导作用，以应对自然灾害以及通俗的军事隐喻，这些隐喻为这些组织的文化提供了信息，因此，研究人员适应了所谓的“军事教义”，以描述“指挥和控制”，以描述社交媒体上的成熟度和外部良好的内部和外部交流，以表征其内部和外部的练习，以表征其内部和外部的练习，以表征这些练习，以表征这些练习，并将其与外部进行交流，以相反的方式，以相反的方式来描述这些组织的实践，以相反的方式来描述其内部的成熟程度市政组织在场，例如FEMA和红十字会。这项研究的结果将有助于改进的响应技术，并通过正式的响应工作更好地整合基于社区的，临时组织和新兴组织。