Crowd Sourcing Application for Chennai Flood 2015

Abstract

Presently social media plays a vital role in people’s life. During the Chennai floods of November–December 2015, victims and also the relief centers have used the social media for sharing the information regarding the disaster. The crowd sourced data which speeds up disaster management actions such as rescue and relief services to the victims. Though the social media can provide effective disaster relief services, it does not provide an essential coordination for sharing information, resources, and plans among distinct relief organizations. However, proposed open source crowdsourcing platform overcomes this issue by offering a powerful capability for collecting information from disaster scenes. It also visualizes the interactive map which was used to crowdsource the information and generates reports as well. The reports and the database generated are helpful to the government and NGO’s for the preparedness of the disaster in future i.e., for relief decision making. The article describes the usage of open source crowd sourcing platform for Chennai flood disaster, 2015.