Increasing efficiency of humanitarian organizations with volunteer driven information products

Abstract

Emerging technologies provide new opportunities to humanitarian organizations for enhancing their response to crisis situations. Since the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, online volunteer communities have been activated to gather data and generate information products to improve humanitarian organizations' situational awareness and decision making. However, how and to what extent these information products influence the operations and organizational routines of the humanitarian organizations is a matter of considerable debate. In this paper we introduce an evaluation method to determine the impact of these new opportunities. Built on existing evaluation design principles for information systems, the resulting framework is used to identify the relevant impact factors in creating and using volunteer driven information products. Our results show that, despite the high response time and technical expertise, the organizational performance impact is inhibited by the limited embedding of volunteer driven information products in the organization. Using the presented evaluation tool the impact of other deployments can be determined and improved in a similar manner. © 2014 IEEE.