Crisis management and social media: Assuring effective information governance for long term social sustainability

When managing a crisis, governments and their agencies have to balance their responsibility to the societies they serve and the groups and individuals within them, all within a legislative framework. They must effectively use information that is available to them to make critical decisions to prevent, prepare, respond and recover from a crisis in the context of social sustainability [1]. While governments and agencies have their own command and control systems that assist them to manage crises, how do they assure the value, authenticity, accuracy, reliability and legality of information that is generated by individuals and groups during a crisis, on Social Media platforms? How does this impact social sustainability? This paper analyses the case of the University of Canterbury Student Volunteer Army (SVA) that was formed through the use of Social Media in the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes (September 2010 to June 2011) through a lens of self producing/structuring systems (autopoiesis). It then argues that the ideas of autopoiesis may assist us to better understand the appropriate blending of open Social Media and closed commercial systems for social sustainability during a crisis.