Active Participation and Motivation of Professionalised Digital Volunteer Communities: Distributed Decision Making and its Impact on Disaster Management Organisations

专业化数字志愿者社区的积极参与和激励：分布式决策及其对灾害管理组织的影响

• 批准号: 314672086
• 负责人: Professor Dr.-Ing. Frank Fiedrich
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Lehrstuhl für Bevölkerungsschutz, Katastrophenhilfe und Objektsicherheit
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Priority Programmes
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2015-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/314672086?language=en
• 关键词: Active; Participation; Motivation; Professionalised; Digital

In recent years, Social Media data and especially Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) played a novel and increasingly important role in the disaster management domain. Digital volunteers, who network virtually and collaborate with each other, have a high potential to improve decision making processes by collecting, assessing, analysing and verifying valuable, crisis-related information from services such as Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. VGI volunteers have grown together over time and formed specialised digital volunteer communities, like for example the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). Because of their open community and rather low barriers for entering and exiting those communities, these VGI communities can be characterised as “loosely coupled communities”. In parallel and in order to have better pre-established and functional links between formal disaster management agencies and digital volunteers, more and more response agencies established so-called Virtual Operations Support Teams (VOST). Frequently the team members have practical experience in disaster management operations. Due to these characteristics, the above-mentioned teams can be characterised as “professionalised digital volunteer communities”.The team itself often works geographically dispersed at different locations and has a liaison officer, who either works directly in the emergency operation center (EOC) or close-by. The volunteers create actionable information for the disaster managers by detecting unusual events, creating crisis maps or aggregating image analysis. To perform these tasks the team may also collaborate with the more traditional, loosely coupled VGI communities or other VOST-like teams. Due to the real-time character of the operational work, the distributed decision making of the professionalised digital volunteers is typically performed in a time-critical environment.The overall objective of the proposed research is to better understand the implications of these volunteers for the efficiency of disaster management operations. Based on the result of previous work, the proposed research addresses three fields of interest: (1) motivational research related to the active participation of these professionalised digital volunteer communities, (2) the required organisational change and organisational success factors related to the successful implementation of the new volunteer structures in formal response organisations and (3) the improvement of time-critical and distributed decision making processes of these teams at the interface of loosely coupled VGI communities and formal disaster management organisations. To conduct this research, a mixed-method approach using quantitative surveys, interviews and workshops is applied. The distributed decision making process is analysed via observational field studies during real-world deployments and exercises. The research results will also include implications for future decision support systems.

近年来，社交媒体数据，尤其是志愿地理信息（VGI）在灾害管理领域发挥着新颖且日益重要的作用。数字志愿者通过虚拟方式建立联系并相互协作，通过从 Twitter、Facebook 或 YouTube 等服务收集、评估、分析和验证有价值的危机相关信息，具有很大的潜力来改进决策流程。随着时间的推移，VGI 志愿者一起成长并形成了专门的数字志愿者社区，例如人道主义 OpenStreetMap 团队 (HOT)。由于社区开放，进入和退出社区的门槛较低，这些 VGI 社区可以被称为“松散耦合社区”。与此同时，为了在正式灾害管理机构和数字志愿者之间建立更好的预先建立的功能联系，越来越多的响应机构建立了所谓的虚拟运营支持团队（VOST）。团队成员通常具有灾害管理操作的实践经验。由于这些特点，上述团队可以被称为“专业化的数字志愿者社区”。团队本身往往在地理上分散在不同的地点，并有一名联络官，该联络官要么直接在紧急行动中心（EOC）工作，要么就在附近。志愿者通过检测异常事件、创建危机地图或汇总图像分析，为灾难管理者创建可操作的信息。为了执行这些任务，团队还可以与更传统、松散耦合的 VGI 社区或其他类似 VOST 的团队合作。由于业务工作的实时性，专业化数字志愿者的分布式决策通常在时间紧迫的环境中进行。本研究的总体目标是更好地了解这些志愿者对灾害管理业务效率的影响。基于之前的工作结果，拟议的研究涉及三个感兴趣的领域：（1）与这些专业化数字志愿者社区的积极参与相关的动机研究，（2）与在正式响应组织中成功实施新的志愿者结构相关的所需组织变革和组织成功因素，以及（3）在松散耦合的 VGI 社区和这些团队的界面上改进这些团队的时间紧迫和分布式决策过程 正式的灾害管理组织。为了进行这项研究，采用了定量调查、访谈和研讨会的混合方法。通过现实世界部署和演习期间的观察性现场研究来分析分布式决策过程。研究结果还将包括对未来决策支持系统的影响。