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

• 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

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.

灾难响应总是既包括正式组织，如红十字会、国民警卫队和市政警察、消防和紧急医疗队，也包括非正式组织，如邻居、家庭和社区或社交俱乐部。然而，在哈维飓风的案例中，新的社交媒体平台使临时或非正式灾难应急者之间的协调达到了前所未有的水平，#RedNeckSea和@CajuNavy救济就是一个例子，模糊了付费应急者和志愿者应急者之间的界限。这些应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应急人员不一致，但他们草根、灵活和了解当地情况的专业知识是社区复原力的重要来源。社交媒体在应急组织中的重要性与日俱增，这对规划和理解复原力的现有方法提出了严重挑战，因为这些组织不是通过正式程序、正式成员分配或法律权利创建的。相反，它们是通过具有共同目标的个人之间的沟通而构成的。这项研究通过应用“指挥与控制”的军事原则来研究决策权的分配、沟通模式以及利用社交媒体组织应对飓风哈维的志愿者行动中的信息获取，从而满足了与灾难应对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，从而拯救生命，加快灾后恢复。该项目的目标是了解紧急响应组织在飓风哈维救援工作期间减轻灾害风险方面的作用。为了实现这一目标，研究小组探索了像#RedNeckNaval这样的紧急志愿者响应组织在救灾工作中的发展和随后的作用。这些组织是由Twitter和Zello等社交媒体平台上的交流组成的。该小组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个组织动态，这些动态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，这样的组织动态是不存在的。每个过程都是通过成员的沟通实践创建和充实的。这项研究包括社交媒体收集、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援工作中形成和变化的方式。由于学者们也试图了解组织成员如何理解事件的意义，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。在应急响应组织中提出的意义构建和定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。鉴于美国海岸警卫队、国民警卫队和美国陆军等军事组织在应对自然灾害方面的领导作用，以及普遍存在的军事隐喻，这些组织的文化被称为“指挥与控制”，研究人员采用军事理论来描述社交媒体支持的紧急响应组织中现存的组织成熟度水平，并描述其内部和外部沟通实践，特别是与现有的更正式的联邦和市政组织，如联邦应急管理局和红十字会相比。这项研究的结果将有助于改进响应技术，并更好地将基于社区的、临时的和紧急的组织与正式的响应努力相结合。

项目成果

Being Prepared to be Unprepared: Meaning Making is Critical for the Resilience of Critical Infrastructure Systems

做好准备，做好准备：意义创造对于关键基础设施系统的弹性至关重要

• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: Integral review
• 作者: JE Thomas, TP Seager

Rethinking Resilience Analytics

重新思考弹性分析

• DOI: 10.1111/risa.13328
• 发表时间: 2019
• 期刊: Risk Analysis
• 影响因子: 3.8
• 作者: Eisenberg, Daniel;Seager, Thomas;Alderson, David L.
• 通讯作者: Alderson, David L.