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CSCWSmart? Collective Intelligence and CSCW in Crisis Situations
24th September 2011, European Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Conference (ECSCW 2011), 24-28 September 2011, Aarhus, Denmark
Contact: m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk<mailto:buscher@lancaster.ac.uk>
Website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/groups/mobilities-lab/event/3688/
Conference Website: http://www.ecscw2011.org/
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Abstract: There are potentially rich synergies between socio-technical
innovation in collective intelligence, mobilities research and
Computer Supported Cooperative Work research. Examples like Wikipedia,
collaborative sense-making in crisis situations (Palen et al 2007),
participatory sensing projects (Cambell 2008, Goldman 2009, Haque) and
alternative reality games such as 'I love Bees' (Gurzick 2011)
illustrate that collaborative work can mobilise many distributed
people and diverse kinds of information and that the results can
amount to 'crowdsourced' production of intelligence about complex
problems (Zwass 2010). On the other hand, the concept can mask
problematic tendencies - far from being emergent and self-organising
- some forms of collective intelligence may be the result of
'puppetmastering' (McGonigal 2006). Alternatively, sensitive
orchestration of public virtual mobilisation practices may open up
new, genuinely collaborative opportunities for public engagement.
This workshop takes examples of collaborative work and collective
intelligence in disasters and 'creeping' crises such as climate
change to explore opportunities and challenges for innovation.
Description: Crisis situations engender intensive information flows
and need for collaboration not only between official and
non-governmental emergency response agencies and the media, but also
amongst members of the public. People affected by earthquakes, fires,
floods, violence or slow motion disasters such as climate change or
soil erosion, their colleagues, friends and relatives, and those who
may have helpful knowledge increasingly use social media (Facebook,
Twitter) to communicate and make sense of events, and to work together
to respond to the situation. This one day workshop focuses on one
particular phenomenon of social media use in crises: 'collective
intelligence'.
Collective intelligence is an ambiguous and highly productive, but
also potentially treacherous concept. On the one hand, the notion can
highlight positive social innovation, including the collective,
'crowdsourced' mobilisation and production of intelligence about
complex problems (Zwass 2010), new 'means for knowing what we are
doing as a group' (Levy 1997, Malone& Klein 2007, Connected
Environments, Cambell 2008, Goldman 2009), or new distributed
problem-solving capabilities that are 'best understood as emergent
and collective rather than orchestrated' (Vieweg et al 2007). On the
other hand, the concept can mask problematic tendencies.
Informational practices and content in social media can fuel
confusion in crisis situations, spread simplistic messages with
highly affective charge, they can be manipulated - maliciously, or by
the media or organisations seeking to maximise donations, indeed -
far from being emergent and self-organising - some forms of collective
intelligence in crisis may be the result of 'puppetmastering' to take
a term from discussions about totalitarian tendencies in gaming
(McGonigal 2006). Alternatively, sensitive orchestration of public
informational practices may open up new, genuinely collaborative
opportunities for public engagement in crisis response (e.g.
Rogstadius et al. 2011, Starbird 2011, Heinzelman and Waters 2009,
RDTN, SAHANA, Ushahidi,) and provide professionals with new
resources, resonating with experiences in citizen science (Hemment et
al 2010).
This workshop seeks to discuss how members of the public and
professionals in emergency response currently use social media to
collaborate in crises. The boundaries between collaborative
professional and volunteer work are blurred here. Exploiting the
evocative ambiguity of the notion of 'collective intelligence', we
explore examples of real world practices. Longer term aims are to
establish an overview of relevant research, to debate opportunities
and challenges for design and to identify needs for new research.
Questions might include:
Are there historical precedents/precursors?
How is collective intelligence (CI) done in practice? What forms does it take?
Are different forms of CI associated with different kinds of complex problems?
What are intended and unintended consequences?
How do collective intelligence practices evolve over the life-span of a crisis?
How does bottom-up collective intelligence integrate with top-down
crisis interventions by governments and NGOs?
Submissions: We invite submission of (working) papers, up to 15 pages.
We're happy to receive a range of different lengths of papers, so
anything from 3-15 pages would be fine. All contributions must be
formatted in strict accordance with the ECSCW formatting instructions
(author kits and paper templates are available for Word, PDF, and
LaTeX). Please submit a PDF to m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk
<mailto:buscher@lancaster.ac.uk> . A maximum of 30 participants can be
accepted.
Important Dates
1st June 2011 Deadline for paper sumissions
15th June 2011 Notification of decision
28th June 2011Early Bird Registration ends*
1st September 2011 Background readings, draft papers and videos** in a wiki
23rd September 2011 Dinner in town for those already here
* Please note that registration is for the full conference.
** From a previous workshop at ZiF Bielefeld
<http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/event/3677> , a range of
resources may be available, including video presentations:
Social media challenges from the perspective of professional
responders - Jonas Landgren (IT University, Gothenburg, Sweden)
Communication, Coordination, and Collective Action - David Gurzick
(Hood College, USA)
Crisis Informatics -Leysia Palen (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA)
Connecting emergency management and public use of Twitter in crisis
situations -Irina Shklovski (IT University, Copenhagen)
References
Campbell, A. T., Eisenman, S. B., Lane, N. D., Miluzzo, E., Peterson,
R. A., Lu, H. Zheng, X. Musolesi, M., Fodor, K., Ahn, G-S. (2008).
The Rise of People-Centric Sensing, IEEE Internet Computing, pp.
12-21, July/August, 2008
Connected Environments http://www.connectedenvironments.com/
<http://www.connectedenvironments.com>
Gurzick, D., White, K.F., Lutters, W.G., Landry, B.M., Dombrowski, C.
and Kim, J.Y. (2011). Designing the future of collaborative workplace
systems: lessons learned from a comparison with alternate reality
games. In Proceedings of the 2011 iConference (iConference '11). ACM,
New York, NY, USA, 174-180.
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1940761.1940785
Goldman, J., Shilton, K., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Hansen, M.,
Ramanthan, N., Reddy, S., Samanta, V., Srivastava, M., West. R.
(2009). Participatory Sensing: A citizen-powered approach to
illuminating the patterns that shape our world. Woodrow Wilson Center
for International Scholars, May 2009.
Haque Design and Research http://www.haque.co.uk/pachube.php
Heinzelman, J. and Waters, C, (2009). Crowdsourcing Crisis
Information in Disaster-Affected Haiti. United States Institute of
Peace. http://www.usip.org/publications/crowdsourcing-crisis-information-in-disaster-affected-haiti
Hemment, D., Ellis, R., Wynne, B. (2011) Participatory Mass
Observation and Citizen Science
<http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/LEON_a_00096?journalCode=leon>
. Leonardo Transactions Vol. 44, No. 1, Pages 62-63. MIT Press
Levy, P. (1997) Collective Intelligence. Mankind's Emerging World in
Cyberspace. Translated by R. Bononno. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.
Malone, T.W. and Klein, M. (2007) Harnessing Collective Intelligence
to Address Global Climate Change.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.3.15
McGonigal, J. (2006) The Puppetmaster Problem: Design for real world,
mission based gaming. In Harrigan, P. and Wardrip-Fruin, N. (Eds)
Second Person. Cambridge: MIT Press: 251-264.
Palen, L., S. Vieweg, J. Sutton, S.B. Liu& A. Hughes (2007)
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on E-Social Science,
Ann Arbor, MI, Oct 7-9, 2007.
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/palen_papers/palen-crisisinformatics.pdf
<http://www.cs.colorado.edu/%7Epalen/palen_papers/palen-crisisinformatics.pdf>
RDTN http://www.rdtn.org/<http://www.rdtn.org>
Rogstadius, J., Kostakos, V., Laredo, J., Vukovic, M. (2011) Towards
Real-time Emergency Response using Crowd Supported Analysis of Social
Media. CHI 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation.
http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/
<http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/%20>
SAHANA http://www.crowdsourcing.org/site/sahana/wwwsahanafoundationorg/3293
Starbird, K. Digital Volunteerism During Disaster: Crowdsourcing
Information Processing. (2011) CHI 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and
Human Computation. http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/
<http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/%20>
Ushahidi http://www.ushahidi.com/<http://www.ushahidi.com>
Vieweg, S., L. Palen, S. Liu, A. Hughes, J. Sutton (2008). Collective
Intelligence in Disaster: An Examination of the Phenomenon in the
Aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech Shooting. Proceedings of the 5th
International ISCRAM Conference, Washington DC, USA, May 2008.
Zwass, V. (2010) Series Editor's introduction. Van De Walle, B.,
Turoff, M., Hiltz, S.R. (Eds.) Information Systems for Emergency
Management. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, ix-xii.
Schedule on the Day (preliminary)
09:00 Coffee
09:30 Introductions
10:00 Presentations
10:30 Coffee
11:00 Presentations
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Presentations
15:00 Coffee
15:30 Group Discussions (Small Groups)
16:30 What next?
19:00 Dinner
Post workshop Depending on our 'What next?' discussions we may
continue our online collaboration.
Organisers Matthias Betz1, Monika Büscher2, Rebecca Ellis3, Maria
Angela Ferrario4, Gerd Kortuem4, Marén Schorch5, Jon Whittle4, Andreas
Zimmerman1
Fraunhofer Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik, FIT, Germany
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK
Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK
Computing Department, Lancaster University, UK
Research Group 'Communicating Disasters', Centre for
Interdisciplinary Studies ZiF, Bielefeld University, Germany
{m.buscher, r.ellis, m.ferrario, g.kortuem,
j.whittle}@lancaster.ac.uk;<http://lancaster.ac.uk>
maren.schorch@uni-bielefeld.de;<mailto:schorch@uni-bielefeld.de>
{andreas.zimmermann; matthias.betz}@fit.fraunhofer.de
Acknowledgements: This workshop builds on work undertaken in the
Bridge Project (EU FP7, http://www.sec-bridge.eu), the Citizens
Transforming Society: Tools for Change (CaTalyST) Project (EPSRC,
UK), Next Generation Resilience Project 'DFuse' (EPSRC) and the
Communicating Disasters Programme at the Centre for Interdisciplinary
Studies, ZiF (http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/ZIF/FG/2010CommunicatingDisaster/),
Bielefeld University, Germany.
