research-article

"Beacons of hope" in decentralized coordination: learning from on-the-ground medical twitterers during the 2010 Haiti earthquake

Authors:

Aleksandra Sarcevic,

Mossaab Bagdouri,

Kenneth AndersonAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

Pages 47 - 56

https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145217

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We examine the public, social media communications of 110 emergency medical response teams and organizations in the immediate aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. We found the teams through an inductive analysis of Twitter communications acquired over the three-week emergency period from 89,114 Twitterers. We then analyzed the teams' Twitter streams, as well as all digital media they generated and pointed to in their streams - blog posts, photographs, videos, status updates and field reports - to understand the medical coordination challenges they faced from pre-deployment readiness to on-the-ground action. Here we identify opportunities for improving coordination in a decentralized and distributed environment where staffing, disease trajectories, and other circumstances rapidly change. We extrapolate from these findings to theorize about how "beaconing" behavior is a sign of latent potential for coordination upon which mechanisms of coordination can capitalize.

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Cited By

Karhu MRantasila AOlsson THäkkilä J(2024)Understanding animal-oriented social media collaboration in Australia’s 2019–20 bushfire crisisFrontiers in Communication10.3389/fcomm.2024.14403119Online publication date: 12-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1440311
Dash PAxtell BGeiskkovitch DNeustaedter CStuerzlinger W(2024)Multimedia-Enabled 911: Exploring 911 Callers’ Experience of Call Taker Controlled Video Calling in Simulated EmergenciesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3643055(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3643055
Lamsal RRead MKarunasekera S(2024)CrisisTransformers: Pre-trained language models and sentence encoders for crisis-related social media textsKnowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2024.111916296(111916)Online publication date: Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2024.111916
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Index Terms

"Beacons of hope" in decentralized coordination: learning from on-the-ground medical twitterers during the 2010 Haiti earthquake
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing

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cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

February 2012

1460 pages

ISBN:9781450310864

DOI:10.1145/2145204

General Chairs:
Steven Poltrock
Boeing Research & Technology
,
Carla Simone
University of Milano-Biccoca
,
Program Chairs:
Jonathan Grudin
Microsoft Research
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Gloria Mark
University of California, Irvine
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John Riedl
University of Minnesota

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 11 February 2012

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February 11 - 15, 2012

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1440311
Dash PAxtell BGeiskkovitch DNeustaedter CStuerzlinger W(2024)Multimedia-Enabled 911: Exploring 911 Callers’ Experience of Call Taker Controlled Video Calling in Simulated EmergenciesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3643055(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3643055
Lamsal RRead MKarunasekera S(2024)CrisisTransformers: Pre-trained language models and sentence encoders for crisis-related social media textsKnowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2024.111916296(111916)Online publication date: Jul-2024
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Singh MAgarwal KVerma KYadav R(2022)Urgency Status Classification of Multilingual Medical Emergency Tweets Using Transformer-based Cross-Lingual Encoders2022 2nd International Conference on Advance Computing and Innovative Technologies in Engineering (ICACITE)10.1109/ICACITE53722.2022.9823667(2122-2127)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2022
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