Crowd Sourcing Challenges Assessment Index for Disaster Management

Emergency agencies (EA) rely on inter-agency approaches to information management during disasters. EA have shown a significant interest in the use of cloud-based social media such as Twitter and Facebook for crowd-sourcing and distribution of disaster information. While the intentions are clear, the question of what are its major challenges are not. EA have a need to recognise the challenges in the use of social media under their local circumstances. This paper analysed the recent literature, 2010 Haiti earthquake and 2010-11 Queensland flood cases and developed a crowd sourcing challenges assessment index construct specific to EA areas of interest. We argue that, this assessment index, as a part of our large conceptual framework of context aware cloud adaptation (CACA), can be useful for the facilitation of citizens, NGOs and government agencies in a strategy for use of social media for crowd sourcing, in preventing, preparing for, responding to and recovering from disasters.