Crowdsourcing-Enabled Crisis Collaborative Decision Making

Abstract

Crisis events put crisis response organizations in a unique and complex situation that requires critical real-time distributed decision-making so that lives and properties are saved and protected. With the growing development of collaborative technologies, citizen participation to the crisis management process has shifted from the passive one-way contribution of social networking data to a more active participation by performing specific tasks related to crisis data processing. This article presents a comprehensive approach for integrating the crowdsourcing process to the collaborative decisional process in crisis situations. Within the approach three aspects are highlighted: the coordination work that exists between the relevant stakeholders in making collective decisions, the modeling of case dependent activities within the decisional process, and the detailed modeling of decision-related tasks. The authors investigate the applicability of the proposal with a real-world case study of the Desert Locust Plague carried out in the Algerian National Institute of Plant Protection.