Measuring social responsiveness for improved handling of extreme situations

Abstract

Volunteering and community reaction is known to be an essential part of response to critical events. Rapid evolution and emergence of the new means of communication allowed even further expansion of these practices via the medium of the social networks. A new category of volunteers emerged – those that are not in the proximity to the area of emergency but willing to help the affected. Widely known as digital volunteers, they help aggregate, disseminate and distribute information to increase and maintain the awareness of stakeholders and resourceful individuals about the situation. There has been an upsurge of investigations of roles, timelines and aggregate characteristics of emergent communication. Compared to that, characteristics of crisis-related social media posts that predict wider social response to date have been studied modestly. In this research we are studying the process of reaction of potential digital volunteers to different extreme situations in a social media platform.