Interaction with citizens experiments: from context-aware alerting to crowdtasking

The EU FP7 project DRIVER is conducting a number of experiments to assess the feasibility of addressing known deficiencies in crisis management. In this paper, we introduce experiments that investigate two-way communication solutions between crisis managers and citizens or unaffiliated volunteers. In the so-called “Interaction with Citizens” experiments we are testing the usability and acceptance of the various methods and tools that facilitate crisis communication at several levels. This includes: informing and alerting of citizens; micro-tasking of volunteers; gathering of situational information about the crisis incident from volunteers; and usage of this information to improve situation awareness. At the time of writing this paper, our “Interaction with Citizens” experiments are still under way. Therefore, this paper reports the lessons learned in the first two experiments along with the experimental setup and expectations for the final experiment.