RAPID: The Role of Emergent Organizations in Hurricane Harvey Response

灾难响应一直包括正式组织，如红十字会、国民警卫队、市政警察、消防和紧急医疗队，以及非正式团体，如邻居、家庭、社区或社交俱乐部。然而，在飓风哈维的情况下，新的社交媒体平台使得临时或非正式的灾难救援人员之间的协调达到了前所未有的水平，例如#RedNeckNavy和@CajunNavyRelief，模糊了付费和志愿救援人员之间的界限。这些紧急响应组织的典型特征是成员流动、领导分散和任务定义不稳定。虽然这些分散的属性可能与官方反应人员不一致，但他们的基层、灵活和当地知情的专业知识代表了社区恢复力的重要来源。社会媒体在应急组织中的重要性日益增加，这对规划和理解复原力的现有方法构成了严重挑战，因为这些组织不是通过正式程序、正式委派成员或法定权利创建的。相反，它们是通过具有共同目标的个体之间的交流而形成的。本研究通过应用“指挥与控制”的军事理论来检查决策权的分配、通信模式和使用社交媒体来组织志愿者对飓风哈维的响应，填补了与灾害响应相关的关键国家需求。这项研究有可能提高应急反应的有效性，从而挽救生命并加速灾后恢复。这个项目的目标是了解紧急响应组织在哈维飓风救灾工作中减轻灾害风险的作用。为了实现这一目标，研究小组探索了紧急志愿者响应组织（如#RedNeckNavy）在救灾工作中的发展和后续作用。这些组织是通过Twitter和Zello等社交媒体平台上的交流组成的。该团队使用混合方法来了解这些组织如何利用社交媒体平台建立三种组织动态，并将其转化为成功的实地救灾行动：信息分发、互动模式和决策权分配。在飓风方面，这种组织动力并不先验地存在。每个流程都是通过成员的沟通实践来创建和充实的。这项研究包括社交媒体抓取、语言分析和数据可视化工具，以确定在线社区中最具影响力的成员，以及上述三种动态在救灾工作中形成和变化的方式。由于学者们还试图了解组织成员如何对事件产生意义，研究人员将定量数据分析与定性访谈、参与者观察和有影响力的新兴组织成员的焦点小组相结合。紧急响应组织中存在的意义构建和取向有助于理解一些组织如何以及为什么将威胁和危机的意义视为削弱，而其他组织能够克服威胁，有利于响应和恢复。考虑到美国海岸警卫队、国民警卫队和美国陆军军团等军事组织在应对自然灾害方面的领导作用，以及这些组织文化中普遍存在的军事隐喻，研究人员采用了被称为“指挥与控制”的军事理论来描述社会媒体支持的应急响应组织中存在的组织成熟度水平，并描述了其内部和外部沟通实践的特征。特别是与联邦应急管理局和红十字会等更正式的联邦和市政组织相比。本研究的结果将有助于改进响应技术，更好地将社区组织、特设组织和紧急组织与正式响应工作相结合。

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.