Riskr: A Low-Technological Web2.0 Disaster Service to Monitor and Share Information

Disaster management using the World Wide Web is an emergent field that uses technology to enhance user collaboration around disasters. While there exist a number of dedicated 'disaster portals', large social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, can facilitate the analysis and sharing of a collective intelligence regarding disaster information on a far greater scale. Social networks have the potential to increase accessibility to, and the use of a disaster portal. This paper presents the 'Riskr' project, which applies a low-technological solution to creating disaster portals fed by social networking messages, and the strategies used in its development. The system has been implemented using Twitter and tested by users to determine whether there is merit in having interoperability between social networks and disaster portals. Preliminary results suggest there is some benefit in using Twitter as a middleware between users and the implemented disaster service. A usability study showed that 70.5% of the users were able to estimate the location of a disaster within a certain error margin. Furthermore, 95% of users were able to successfully adapt to using the system. The results from the Riskr project suggest that the combination of online services and interoperability between disaster portals and social networks can further enhance disaster management initiatives.