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

近年来，社交媒体数据，特别是地理信息（VGI）在灾害管理领域发挥着越来越重要的作用。数字志愿者通过虚拟网络相互协作，通过收集、评估、分析和验证来自Twitter、Facebook或YouTube等服务的有价值的危机相关信息，具有很大的潜力来改善决策过程。随着时间的推移，VGI志愿者们一起成长，形成了专门的数字志愿者社区，例如人道主义开放街道地图团队（HOT）。由于其开放的社区和相当低的进入和退出这些社区的障碍，这些VGI社区可以被描述为“松散耦合的社区”。与此同时，为了在正式的灾害管理机构和数字志愿者之间建立更好的预先建立和功能联系，越来越多的响应机构建立了所谓的虚拟运营支持团队（VOST）。小组成员往往具有灾害管理业务方面的实际经验。由于这些特点，上述团队可以被描述为“专业化的数字志愿者社区”。团队本身通常在地理上分散在不同的地点工作，并有一名联络官，他直接在紧急行动中心（EOC）工作或在附近工作。志愿者通过检测异常事件、创建危机地图或汇总图像分析，为灾害管理人员创建可操作的信息。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，分布式决策的专业化数字志愿者通常是在一个时间紧迫的环境中进行的。拟议的研究的总体目标是更好地了解这些志愿者的影响，为灾害管理业务的效率。基于以前工作的结果，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有关的动机研究，（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;（3）改善时间-这些团队在松散耦合的VGI社区和正式灾害管理组织的界面上的关键和分布式决策过程。为了进行这项研究，采用定量调查，访谈和研讨会的混合方法。分布式决策过程中进行了分析，通过观察实地研究在现实世界的部署和演习。研究结果还将包括对未来决策支持系统的影响。

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.