A New Contribution to the Information Ecology of Humanitarian Work

He refutes genetic theories of European superiority and makes a good case against economic determinism. His quarry are the “enlightened” Westerners—would-be democratizers, globalizers, well-intended purveyors of humanitarian aid—who impose impersonal institutions and abstract political principles on societies rooted in familial networks, and don’t seem to notice the trouble that follows.

You do not process your projects through an Institutional Review Board, nor you are equipped to deal with persons who express trauma to you.

An estimated 13.1 million people in Congo are now in need of humanitarian assistance.

Our research reveals several design opportunities in this space. Importantly, informed by the empirical findings presented here, we argue for situating solutions within current work practices and infrastructures.

Empirical research on historical disaster events shows response efforts taking four different organizational forms: established, extending, expanding, and emerging [3

rauma centersare representative of organizational entities that arefaced with unpredictable environmental demands,complexsetsoftechnologies,highcoordinationloads,and the paradoxical need to achieve high reliabilitywhile maintaining efficient operations.

I proposed three new dimensions to considerin conceptualizations of Big Data, which are intendedto nuance and temper some of the grand claims of BigData’s affordances.Key principles from critical and feminist GIS havehere been leveraged to understand the limitations andimpacts of Big Data. Further integration of principlesfrom critical information technologies research willideally seek to show how technologies shape andreproduce uneven social and political relations. Thissort of research can have practical influence on howtechnologies are leveraged, working to ameliorate thepotentially harmful implications of new technologies.More broadly, research critiquing and situating thegeographies of humanitarianism can be integrated intostudies of Big Data digital humanitarianism. Conver-sations around technologies for development andhumanitarianism overwhelmingly bring Western ide-als into non-Western contexts, without considering theimplications of this power relation. Critiquing theserelations should be central to theories of informationtechnologies, with the goal of rectifying and

are certainly not limited to, continued struggles aroundknowledge politics and legitimacy (Burns2014;Elwood and Leszczynski2013), shifting understand-ings of scientific knowledge production (Dalton andThatcher2014; Crampton et al.2013), and increasedneoliberalization of humanitarian aid (Adams2013;Hyndman2009; Polman2010). In other words, theseprocesses take a form specific to Big Data digitalhumanitarianism, and exploring this case sheds greaterlight on these larger-scale processes.

signifies a new epistemology insofar as it portraysevents as discrete and isolated; knowledges as mod-ifiable, categorizable, and abstractable; and locally-situated knowledges as best understood by thoseworking remotely

Not only does the convergence of BigData and humanitarianism depend on a particularsocial shaping of technologies and data, but Big Dataitself embodies particular values, social relations, andepistemologies

Digital humanitarianism can be con-ceptualized as ‘‘the enacting of social and institutionalnetworks, technologies, and practices that enable large,unrestricted numbers of remote and on-the-groundindividuals to collaborate on humanitarian managementthrough digital technologies’’ (Burns2014).

However, discussions of the relationship between BigData and digital humanitarianism tend to be cautiouslyoptimistic. Letouze ́(2012) the challenges facingdigital humanitarianism as falling into five broadcategories: (1) privacy, (2) access/sharing, (3) extract-ing meaning from qualitative text, (4) apophenia, (5)detecting anomalies.

Theseunderstandings of spatial technologies build on les-sons from science and technology studies (STS)research that describes the processes by which dataand technologies come to assume and reify social andpower relations, worldviews, and epistemologies(Feenberg1999; Pinch and Bijker1987; Wajcman1991; Winner1985)

Bor-rowing principles from critical GIS, technologies canbe seen to embody social norms and values (Schuurman2000; Sheppard2005), often reinforcing extant powerdynamics and social inequalities rather than disruptingthem.

emergent citizen groups (ECGs) in disasters (e.g., Neal I 984, Quarantelli 1985)

In the context of disaster, social media and other ICTare enablingthe manifestation of a “knowledge commons” [11], a shared information space for victims, onlookers, and the convergent digital volunt

Disasters might be one of the few natural events that override the socio-temporal order; indeed, damage to the routines of social life is a defining characteristic that separates disasters from local emergencies and other disruption

In other words, the articulation work [24], which had to be made explicit previously, became in part implicit by being embedded in the document and in the actions taken upon the document.

Under the stress of the situation, with too many peopledoing too many things at once, the socio-technical infrastructure that underliestheirwork practice wasbreaking down. Star and Ruhleder [25] explain that infrastructure becomes visible only at these points of breakdown. Volunteers directedtheir attention to their social configuration as the critical infrastructure here (the technical infrastructure remains take

Giddens’ theory of structuration explains how social structures, defined as rules and resources or transformational relations, are both the products and the pathways of human action [10]. Employing the concept of duality of structure, Giddens contends that social action both shapes and is shaped by these structures. Orlikowski [20] provides a duality of technology framework for applying structuration theory to research on the role of information technology (IT) within organizational change, whereIT is both the product of human action and a medium of human action, functioning to enable and constrain it. The communication constitutes organization perspective again extends structuration to communicative processes, claiming that communication and the organization co-produce and co-adapt[23], and provides a helpful approach for examining organizing within the virtual organization though the digital traces of its communication [4].

Additional features of the disaster domain are that action is often fast-paced and social structures are emergent [15].

uited. Response and relief work ischaracterized byconvergence of people, information and resources. It is also characterized by improvisation, withvolunteers and formal responders alike innovatively adapting to unique and changing conditions, using resources in new ways, taking on new tasks and assembling into new organizational forms [7,9,15]

Describing the from-scratch conditions of virtual organizing, Finholt et al. write that the “absence of prior structure means group members must develop new structures for sharing information, for example, norms or rules for reporting progress and division of labor” [8p. 292]

relief. Virtual organizations are “geographically distributed [organizations] whose members are bound by a ... common interest or goal, and who communicate and coordinate their work through information technology”[1]

ces. In their study of the digital volunteers who instituted the “disaster desk” in response to the 2011 Peru earthquake,Starbird and Palen [34]reveal how work was restructured in response to the restructuring of the information environment volunteers were working in—which itself was an exasperated response to a confused division of labor and in the end enabled the group to sustain itself relative to its production functions

The desire to assist in disaster events in some way is broad [12, 18], but the mechanisms for enabling action in the form of on-line work or commitment, as with other causes, can beunclear [22, 28, 30].

METHODS

By examiningwork practices, and tracing how those practices are reified in the social-technical organization of a group that is forming and stabilizing as they do the work, we learn not just what this particular group did, but also how the mechanisms by which collective action in digital environments are organizedbottom-up. We also learn how those lessonsaregraduated into prescriptivetop-down direction to sustain and direct future action

Following Orlikowski [29], this analysis unites both practice-based [35]and structurational-basedinterpretations of coordination and social organization [8] to understand the nature of collective work in large, distributed,and emergent groups—groups that havesome existing common motivation to help but have little prior precedent for how that work might be conducted[21]

In the domain of pet advocacy, the latent potential for crowd interaction comes fromintrinsic and extrinsic motivations—we focus on how that potentialwas transformed intoa viable form of distributed, decentralized cooperative work.

As Rosner [35] explains, this goes beyond the “affordances” of objects [28] and instead goes to what the tools represent to their craft and their expert execution of w

Furthermore, tolink this back to the matter of expertise, we see thatexpertise was displayed through material objects:people wore clothing that was consistent with their identification as equine experts (such asboots and cowboy hats),and the Posse memberswore theiruniforms.At the ranch, onejob was to hand out halters and lead ropesto riders. If riders’preferred materials were not available,their expertise allowed them to adapt to what was at

Calling upon media theory, which considers how mass media frames and focusesthekind ofattention an eventreceives,e.g., [4,8], social media can do the same.

priori. Such is the situation with disaster.We easily dismisshow uncertainsituations of disaster areor can become, and how a goalin safety-critical work is to avert situations beforethey become problems. Much of the work in safety-and time-critical matters in CSCW appreciates the implications of this goalon vigilance, mutual awareness, and, of course, error, especially propagated error. It is all too easy to blame “pilot error” when a sequence of preceding systemic conditions took place to set a pilot up for perceiving the problem as he or she did [34,48], including one that warns of hazard. Indeed, disaster can magnifyproblems, not necessarily out of proportion, though that can happen, but rather too so that wefocusonspecific detailswhen many things are happening.

Expertise is a type of embedded knowledgedeveloped within a cultural, social and cognitive environment[6].Expertiseistheability to apply knowledge in different contexts[6], including in emergent situations that require experts to improvise, as Normark and Randall note [29]

Mendonça, et al.[26] and Kendra and Wachtendorf [20] have characterized this as improvisation, whichhas strong parallels to the conversations in CSCW about the nature of situated cognition or situated work [14,44], as well as the relationship between informal as well as formal aspects of work [30,44]

Threaded throughout thesearguments is the idea of distributed cognition particularly as it materializes in the on-the-ground work, but also through prior online preparation.Through this lens, we see how ideation ofsolutions sprung from uncertainexpressions ofproblem statementswhich were quickly forwardedto the local (or local enough) domain experts—horsepeople in Colora

Ethnographic Investigation

Finally, a maincontribution of this research lies in the examination of the solicitation of expertise in a digitally-connected world, where widely distributed and diverse expertise must nevertheless be realized under highly localized conditions.

We see how problem definition, work articulation [37], and the materiality of work[27,35] come together to make the work happen in asocially-, spatially-, and temporally-distributed matter[14].

We see howperformances aroundpaperwork intended to connect the online to the offlineare once again superficial[44], and that the offline work is refiguredat the very endprimarily to communicate its successful completion back to a waiting, online crow

In this online-meets-offline account of cooperative work, we see connections to the classic literature in CSCWaround matters of mutual awareness in safety-critical systems[12]that is partially achieved online andonly “satisficingly”[38] achieved

Disconnection Between Offline & Online ResponseIndeed, amajor criticism of much current crisis social mediaresearch is that it does not consider the relationship between online work and offline or on-the-ground activities(Wulf, et al.[49]is a notable published location, and it isadiscussion often brought up at conferencesand in paper reviews). It is an important conce