Emergency Response using Ephemeral Social Communities across Online Social Networks

In an emergency situation, receiving prompt and organized help from nearby people is of critical importance. The growing use of online social networks (OSNs) in emergency situations is a clear indication of the natural applicability of online social networking technologies to emergency responses. Despite this intense interest, a number of fundamental limitations still exist, such as lack of conceptual models and limitations on group organization and cooperation. To address existing limitations, we propose Whistle – a cooperation framework for OSN users which can 1) dynamically organize an emergency community with nearby eligible users who are distributed in heterogeneous online social networks, and 2) guarantee secure communication, unrestricted cooperation and resource sharing by leveraging the SocialVPN virtual network and the Jitsi communicator. To test the feasibility and applicability of Whistle, we present a prototype implementation and demonstrate its applicability to an example use case.