Community incident chatter: Informing local incidents by aggregating local news and social media content

The emergence of social media provides an additional channel for broadcasting information to the public and support two-way communication between governmental stakeholders and the public during crisis. Research has focused on large-scale events, and few have investigated how social media can contribute to civic awareness and participation of small-scale incidents in a community-oriented context. Moreover, social media have been criticized because it is overabundant with noisy, inaccurate, and unprofessional information that are often misleading. This presents a serious challenge for community members to identify information that are relevant to a local incident. We introduce Community Incident Chatter (CIC), a smartphone application that is designed to aggregate information reported by formal news agencies and social media surrounding local incidents. Participants in a preliminary user study indicate that the community-oriented information presented in CIC is informative, relevant to the community, and has the potential of empowering community residents for responding to and managing local incidents.