When disaster strikes there is an immediate flood of people who want to help out in any way they can. At the same time you have various tasks that need to be done that these people might be able to assist with. In the past there have been systems that focus on matching requests for supplies and those that can donate these. But what I am referring to is the ability to match and coordinate people who want to use their free time at the computer to work on tasks such as geo-tagging, data cleaning, data processing, data analysis, etc.
In this blog post I will describe what I think should be the functionality of such a virtual crisis crowd coordination center.
First of all you need to have a place to register their interest in helping out. In this registry they should denote what skills they have and also potentially what time they can provide help at (distributing tasks across time zones can often do magic). This kind of registry should be built on top of an already existing system like Facebook or LinkedIn so that people don’t need to register all their basic information again, but rather just things specific to crisis support.
Then there needs to be a place for organizations (both formal and crowd based ones) to register information about themselves into the system. Registering an organization provides them with an ability to create requests and to send those to the appropriate groups of crowd volunteers based on attributes they define.
Third thing you need is a form of a ticketing system that allows you to create tasks that require volunteers and then the ability for volunteers to sign up for those tasks and perform them. It should be possible to assign tasks to multiple individuals at the same time and then possibly even compare the results from each afterwards.
To provide a sense of quality control and also some “competition” then you could integrate some kind of rating/reward system into this coordination center. Those that finish tasks get “badges” for the work done and can achieve higher levels of status depending on how much work they do. Those requesting work to be done can also rate the work of people and thereby get quality control when they chose who to assign tasks to.
By building this kind of a coordination center you could ensure that there is a ready community to reach out to every time a crisis occurs instead of having to build it up again and again.
I am pretty sure most of the components for such a solution already exist and that it is just a question of putting the right pieces of the puzzle together. Of course this would have to be a scalable cloud-based solution so that it could handle the massive outpour of volunteers we could get this way
If you want to work on making such a coordination center a reality comment below…
Published October 4th 2010 at DisasterExpert