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Local social media users share and access critical information before, during, and after emergencies. However, existing methods can identify local social media users only after an emergency has occurred, and only then discover a small proportion of users sharing information in a geographic area. To address these limitations, we introduce the method of Social Triangulation to identify local social media users who access community information before an emergency in order to develop emergency communications strategies that contribute to community resilience. Social Triangulation identifies local users vis-à-vis the community organizations they curate within their social networks and, as a result, helps reveal the information infrastructure of a community. Consequently, social triangulation can inform emergency communications planning by identifying “filter bubbles” among social media users loosely embedded in an information infrastructure, as well as community influencers who are well-positioned to redistribute official information during an emergency.

The central components of an interpersonal communication framework such as uncertainty reduction theory can be adapted to design and evaluate crisis communication addressing uncertainty between citizens needing access to services and organizations attempting to manage risk and ensure continuity of operations. Through a content analysis of organizational crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article adapts uncertainty reduction theory as an applied, user-centered framework that can guide technical communicators in managing uncertainty during unprecedented crises.

This article examines the role of international humanitarian law (ihl) and humanitarian principles in the discourse of humanitarian negotiation. The article is based on extensive, semi-structured interviews conducted with 53 humanitarian practitioners about their experiences engaging in negotiations in the field. The article proceeds in four parts. Part 1 discusses two key factors at play during humanitarian negotiation processes. The first factor is the counterpart’s familiarity with relevant legal and normative frameworks. The second factor is the interests that can drive counterparts’ behavior. Part 2 presents a framework for understanding how the interaction of these two factors – familiarity and interest-alignment – can shape the discourse of humanitarian negotiation. Part 3 addresses the impact of these same issues on the humanitarian side of the negotiation. In particular, there is the possibility that humanitarian actors themselves might also lack familiarity with ihl and/or humanitarian principles and might find that their interests exist in tension with humanitarian laws and principles. The final section offers concluding remarks.

Violence against aid workers seeking to bring assistance and protection to vulnerable people amid ongoing armed conflicts, disasters or other crises has fuelled growing concern over how to protect the humanitarian mission. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted with 118 practitioners involved in humanitarian operations and security management, this article considers three under-analysed prongs of grappling with humanitarian insecurity. The first three sections, in turn, examine the pursuit of accountability at both the domestic and international levels, public advocacy efforts and confidential negotiation. The fourth section links the article’s assessment of these three modes of responding to humanitarian insecurity to the broader discourse on security management in the humanitarian sector. Specifically, this section revisits and reimagines the security triangle, a framework that has played an influential role in shaping discourse on security management in humanitarian operations. The final section offers concluding remarks.

Background Despite the central role that domestic militaries regularly play in supporting civilian disease outbreak responses, the dynamics of domestic civil-military engagement (CME) during major health emergencies remain largely under-explored in public health, humanitarian, and security literatures. Previous research has found, furthermore, that existing international and domestic civil-military guidelines hold limited relevance during public health emergencies, including epidemics and pandemics, currently evidenced by the observable lack of coherence and high variance in both international and domestic military approaches to supporting COVID-19 responses worldwide. Methods This article presents a comparative analysis of three of these approaches—in China, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines—and maps these countries’ military contributions to the COVID-19 response across a number of domains. Results Analysis of these case studies provides important insights into the ways that CME exists in unacknowledged contexts and forms; how militaries, particularly domestic forces acting as first responders, play an important role in major health crisis contexts; the confusion surrounding how to understand various non-military armed and security actors; and how pandemics, in particular—and other types of largescale health emergencies more broadly—represent a unique domain for CME that tests both the international system and international norms. Conclusion This paper concludes with policy, guidance development, and research recommendations for improved practice for localised CME during public health emergencies.

The humanitarian sector has steadily pushed forward with efforts to cultivate negotiation capacity among aid workers. However, considerations of how the profile of the humanitarian negotiator might shape negotiation outcomes have been, at best, in the background of ongoing professional discussions or, at worst, entirely overlooked. This working paper aims to fill this gap. Based on semi-structured interviews and survey data, this working paper assesses the role of identity characteristics in humanitarian negotiation processes. As the interview and survey results suggest, a negotiator’s profile—including identity characteristics and past professional experiences—can shape counterparts’ perceptions of humanitarian negotiators; fuel humanitarians’ own biases and stereotypes of their interlocutors; and feed into challenging internal organisational dynamics, as humanitarian organisations seek to promote diversity and foster inclusion and belonging among staff.

Next-Generation 911 (NG911) infrastructure will replace analog systems designed to support voice services for landline 911 callers with digital, IP-based systems that will allow smartphone users to “call” 911 via voice, text, image, and streaming video. This brief paper reports findings from a workshop conducted at the 2019 911 Early Adopters’ Summit, during which local 911 professionals from across the United States reflected on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with the adoption of NG911 infrastructure and, in particular, multimedia 911 services. Workshop participants pointed to long-standing issues NG911 stands to exacerbate, including high non-emergency call volumes, poor staff retention, and inadequate psychological support which the influx of multimedia 911 calls, including those with graphic imagery, may worsen. At the same time, participants looked to local, existing resources to mitigate these issues and exploit new opportunities afforded through NG911 infrastructure. Using these findings, preliminary recommendations are offered to improve information resources available to local 911 professionals adopting NG911 systems for effective and efficient multimedia 911 services.

While evacuation decision-making has been extensively studied over the past decades, few studies examine the basis for these decisions: the locations of family and friends who can provide evacuees with social support at evacuation destinations. To address this gap, we conduct a multivariate regression analysis of social–spatial network data gathered from survey respondents in three U.S. areas to understand the relationship between evacuees’ social networks, opportunities for social support, and planned evacuation destinations. Our findings show that the locations of evacuees’ family and friends influence where they plan to go during an evacuation. Evacuees with closer family and friends plan to travel shorter distances than evacuees whose family and friends live farther away. Furthermore, we observe that unsupported evacuees–citizens traveling to destinations outside their social network–plan to travel twice as far as supported evacuees–citizens traveling to destinations where family and friends can offer instrumental, informational, or emotional assistance. These findings suggest new opportunities to predict and model evacuation logistics decisions based on the geographic distribution of evacuees’ social networks and the opportunities for social support they provide.

For over a decade, the field of crisis informatics has observed novel, ad hoc uses of social media among citizens and digital volunteers while noting barriers that impede social media use among municipal responders during crises. These barriers include a lack of tools for processing social media data, a lack of staff to use these tools, and a lack of trust in information gathered from citizens. However, while studies address the collection, processing, and use of social media per se, research continues to overlook the necessity of integrating information gathered from social media and existing information sources relied on by responders working across municipal agencies. Through scenario-based interviews with municipal responders, this study observes that objectives of early warning and proactive emergency response motivate uses of social media during periods of stability to address gaps in information reported by 911 callers, on-scene responders, and various physical sensors. To accomplish these objectives, upstream PSAP staff must process information from multiple physical and social sensors, cue other sensors to verify untrusted reports, and integrate multisensor information for dispatch to downstream first responders, emergency managers, and PIOs. Together, these findings suggest that overcoming barriers to social media use resulting from a lack of tools, staff, and trust requires new and existing sociotechnical infrastructures that facilitate intra- and inter-organizational processes of multisensor integration across periods of stability and crisis.

Emergency responders require accurate geographic information to locate and assess incidents reported on social media. Unfortunately, however, social media often lacks geographic metadata or includes geotags that inaccurately reflect the locations of reported events. Toponyms, place names in social media content, provide another source of geographic information yet toponym usage in emergencies remains poorly understood. To address this gap, this study examines toponym usage across 22,343 tweets posted during a severe storm in the Northeastern United States. Tweets were qualitatively coded for nineteen types of storm-related information as well as toponym usage, location reference, and granularity. Findings show that users i) include more geographic information, including toponyms and geotags, in tweets about emergencies than about other topics; ii) report geographically distributed events but tend to include toponyms rather than geotags when reporting local information; and iii) include mostly municipal and regional toponyms in tweets about emergencies but tend to include hyperlocal toponyms and additional municipal or regional markers in reports of infrastructure damage and service disruption. Together these findings offer implications for social sensing applications in emergency response and management. These include more opportunities for course-grained damage assessment than fine-grained situational awareness, and the need for internal and external sources of geographic information to distinguish information about local and remote events. Lastly, findings suggest opportunities for passive and active sensing approaches responsive to the recipient design of social media: users provide additional geographic context that help others distinguish local and remote risks within noisy information spaces that emerge during geographically distributed crises.

Born-digital scholarship follows ideals of multimodal, interactive design, embodied in the webtext, that open new possibilities for individual and collective reader experience. However, author-designers often fail to consult actual readers about their experiences using born-digital scholarship to assess whether the realities of webtext use measure up to the ideals inspiring webtext design. User-centered design approaches offer opportunities to examine webtext user experience and design for new rhetorical engagements between born-digital designers and users. Findings from think-aloud testing show that users engage webtexts through hyperreading practices of skimming, scanning, and close reading, and experience a sense of placelessness when navigating webtexts, unfamiliarity with webtext designs, and a freedom to read nonlinearly across fragmented texts that can unsettle readers accustomed to a single, linear narrative. These findings suggest implications for webtext designs that facilitate users’ reading practices and suggest that user-centered design approaches can reveal and, in turn, expand the scope of rhetorical engagements possible in born-digital scholarship.

Despite decades of development programming for a country once upheld as a “model democracy” in Africa, Mali remains a country destabilized by extreme poverty; escalating violence and instability; and diminishing prospects for Malians’ futures in education, livelihoods, and security. Even in light of an ongoing international presence and intervention in the country, and millions of dollars raised and spent each year on humanitarian programming, the persistent degradation of governance, livelihoods, and security continues. What drives this state of affairs? How have international and regional actors contributed to sustaining a stagnating state at the expense of civilian populations and in the interest of preventing transnational Sahelian turmoil from expanding into the Maghreb and beyond to European borders? What are the expectations and aspirations of local communities as they navigate the interconnected influences of extremist groups, government actors, and international military forces? This paper examines these questions and offers reflections on various dynamics of the international response and the perceptions of local communities in this context. In particular, this analysis assesses the viability of the “triple nexus” concept, which aims — in protracted and complex crises such as Mali — to forge an operational and policy alignment between international peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian efforts. The paper is based on a desk analysis of relevant literature, as well as over 130 interviews and consultations undertaken with a variety of stakeholders, including government and non-state armed group representatives, civil society members, activists, journalists, humanitarians, analysts, diplomats, entrepreneurs, beneficiaries, displaced people, and students. The interviews were conducted in Mali, particularly in Bamako and in Central Mali, as well as abroad, between December 2018 and March 2019.

International audience; Crisis informatics researchers have taken great interest in methods to identify information relevant to crisis events posted by digital bystanders on social media. This work codifies the information needs of emergency dispatchers and first responders as a method to identify actionable information on social media. Through a design workshop with public safety professionals at a Public-Safety Answering Point (PSAP) in the United States, we develop a set of information requirements that must be satisfied to dispatch first responders and meet their immediate situational awareness needs. We then present a manual coding scheme to identify information satisfying these requirements in social media posts and apply this scheme to fictitious tweets professionals propose as actionable information to better assess ways that this information may be communicated. Finally, we propose automated methods from previous literature in the field that can be used to implement these methods in the future.