Exercise 24: Using Social Media for Crisis Response

Can populations self-organize a crisis response? This is a field report on the first two efforts in a continuing series of exercises termed Exercise 24 or X24. These exercises attempted to demonstrate that self-organizing groups can form and respond to a crisis using low-cost social media and other emerging web technologies. P lotnick and White (2010) describe social media as generally being attributed to the collaborative applications supported by Web 2.0 technologies. These include, but are not limited to Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, wikis, and blogs. Blogs, wikis, and Myspace were the first applications becoming popular in the early 2000s while Facebook and Twitter are more recent creations. The large number of Facebook users, approximately 750 million, show the popularity of social media. Additionally, as social media became popular, individuals and first responders began to use social media for rapid communication to mitigate the unpredictabili-ty of crises and the complexity of crisis response to help themselves. Examples include: concerned citizens used a wiki after Hurricane Katrina to or-• ganize, collaborate, and rapidly create the PeopleFinder and ShelterFinder systems (Murphy and Jennex, 2006). citizens affected by the 2007 San Diego wildfires used a wiki • to pool knowledge on which homes burned and which survived when the local media failed to support their needs (Jennex, 2010). Mumbai citizens used Twitter to report their status, let others • know where to find friends, relatives, etc., and to solicit blood donations following the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks (Beaumont, 2008). victims trapped by falling debris during the 2010 Haiti earth-• quake used texting and/or Facebook to alert their friends and family to their location and condition (Boodhoo, 2010). These anecdotes provide evidence of the value of social media to individuals in responding to crisis. However, is social media useful to organizations in planning and conducting crisis response? Exercise 24, X24, is a series of crisis response exercises testing the formal use of social media and crowdsourc-ing as tools for organizing humanitarian assisted crisis response (HADR). This article discusses the results of X24 and X24 Europe and shows how organizations can create a strategy to incorporate social media into their crisis response activities. VizCenter hosted a two-day virtual HADR event called Exercise 24 (X24) simulating multiple natural disasters on the coasts and desert regions of Southern California and Northern Baja California. The purpose of this exercise was to use online resources to foster the building of …