Exploring the use of social media and crowdsourcing technology in disaster risk governance

LINKS “Strengthening links between technologies and society for European disaster resilience” is a comprehensive research project on information and communication technology and disaster governance in Europe.

A new report by our COPE team provides a methodology for investigating social media and crowdsourcing in the context of disaster risk management. The central aim is to provide an overview of how social media and crowdsourcing technologies are used in disaster risk management in Europe and to understand their limits and potentials for supporting efficient and inclusive processes. 

The methodology is applied to five different cases in Europe over the next six months with the aim of generating two different outputs.

The first output is a comprehensive “map” of all the relevant stakeholders that currently apply social media and crowdsourcing (SMCS) to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. Moreover, this map includes all current regulatory frameworks, guidelines and policies guiding the use of social media and crowdsourcing in the European Union and in Germany, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands.

The second output is an in-depth understanding of the experiences, opportunities and challenges associated with the use of social media and crowdsourcing in disasters across multiple European settings. This includes collecting both best practices and challenges with the aim of informing and improving the impact of technology on disaster risk management in Europe. 

The methodology is based on an extensive literature review connecting the use of social media and crowdsourcing with disaster risk governance.

Read the report here:

Read the literature review here:

Publication Date  2021	Publication Date  2020
Number of pages 88 p.	Number of pages 148 p.

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