"Best practices for agencies to counter misinformation, rumors and false information are detailed and categorized in this white paper, and challenges and additional considerations are presented for review. This report illustrates methods of countering false information on social media with case stud
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ies: The 2014 South Napa earthquake: Tweets were filtered by geolocation to eliminate posts from trolls; The 2016 Louisiana floods: The Red Cross published and shared a blog to counter rumors and misinformation about food distribution and shelter policies; The 2017 Oroville Dam evacuation: An accidentally misleading tweet suggested the evacuation area included all of Sacramento County. Local agencies used traditional and social media to provide correct information. Examples of best practices include: Establishing partnerships with local traditional media outlets before disasters, so means exist to disseminate accurate information; Using the Joint Information System to coordinate public information efforts of multiple jurisdictions and agencies; and Setting up a central website to debunk bad information." (Executive summary)
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"The purpose of this report is to build an understanding of ‘what works’ in Educational Technology (EdTech) to ensure that children can learn in crisis or displaced settings. The field of EdTech is vast and has influenced almost every facet of modern educational delivery. This report will focus
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on ‘child facing’ EdTech, which refers to technology – both software and hardware – designed directly for use by the child or by a teacher, parent, or facilitator working with a child." (Publisher website)
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"The study reveals key aspects of digital connectivity in the lives of refugees at the Ritsona camp in Greece in January 2017. Of the approximately 750 residents of the camp, 135 adults were sampled and interviewed [...] Mobile phone access is 'important' to over 80% of refugees in this study. Women
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are less likely to own a mobile phone than men - 94% of men own a phone, compared to 67% of women [...] Approximately 2 of every 5 refugees participating in this study may be classified as moderately to severely depressed according to the validated depression scale used in the survey. Women have a higher probability of being moderately to severely depressed compared to men (58% v. 34%) [...] Many refugees have a unique sense of the people and platforms they would or would not trust with their sensitive information. Thirty-three percent (33%) said they have been asked to provide information about themselves that they would rather not have given. Eighty-six percent (86%) said they would not be concerned about giving their personal information to a UN official. Yet for Facebook, 30% expressed concern about giving the social media site their personal information, 52% were unconcerned, and 15% were unsure." (Key findings, page 5-6)
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"This book presents a comprehensive framework for disaster communication, with a main focus on earthquake-related communication, building on a previously fragmented, single-case study approach [especially based on experiences in Italy] to analysing the role of social media during natural disasters."
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(Publisher description)
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"Today's global refugee crisis has mobilized humanitarian efforts to help those fleeing persecution and armed conflict at all stages of their journey. Aid organizations are increasingly employing new information technologies in their mission, taking advantage of proliferating mobile phones, remote s
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ensors, wireless networks, and biometric identification systems. Digital Lifeline? examines the use of these technological innovations by the humanitarian community, exploring operations and systems that range from forecasting refugee flows to providing cellular and Internet connectivity to displaced persons. The contributors, from disciplines as diverse as international law and computer science, offer a variety of perspectives on forced migration, technical development, and user behavior, drawing on field work in countries including Jordan, Lebanon, Rwanda, Germany, Greece, the United States, and Canada. The chapters consider such topics as the use of information technology in refugee status determination; ethical and legal issues surrounding biometric technologies; information technology within organizational hierarchies; the use of technology by refugees; access issues in refugee camps; the scalability and sustainability of information technology innovations in humanitarian work; geographic information systems and spatial thinking; and the use of “big data” analytic techniques. Finally, the book identifies policy research directions, develops a unified research agenda, and offers practical suggestions for conducting displacement research." (Publisher description)
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"As the number of people affected by humanitarian crises continues to rise and as crises become more prolonged, humanitarian stakeholders (including humanitarian agencies, NGOs, and others) are responding in different ways, by partnering with the private sector, integrating innovative approaches and
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using digital technology to increase accountability, efficiency and impact. These changes, among others, are laying the foundation for a digital ecosystem for humanitarian assistance. Though nascent, this digital ecosystem has the potential to increase the addressable market, leading to more scalable solutions and platforms that will improve or enhance humanitarian outcomes, both for stakeholders and for crises-affected people." (Executive summary)
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"A Framework for Data Sharing in Practice, Part II, is a collective outcome document from two meetings held in 2017, one in New York in May and a follow-up in Copenhagen in December. The meetings were held with support from OCHA’s Centre for Humanitarian Data. The objective of these meetings was t
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o develop a framework for data sharing by which the humanitarian community can facilitate safe, responsible, and purposeful data and information sharing for stronger humanitarian response and protection outcomes. The December meeting brought together practitioners and thinkers from HHI, NRC, Netherlands Red Cross, IRC, IOM, WFP, JIPS, DRC, OCHA, ProCap, ICRC, UNICEF, and UNHCR who worked to further refine key elements of the Framework for Data Sharing in Practice. The first part of this document is a report on the discussions and agreement arising out of the December working meeting as well as the collaborative review of this document. The second part of this document presents the results of this work, offering the Framework for Data Sharing in Practice (hereafter the ‘Framework’). The document concludes with an annex on ‘Shared Definitions and Concepts’ which defines a minimum set of terms required to support a normative discussion on data and information sharing." (Page 1)
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"This brief guide provides practical tips and advice on how to use social media effectively to engage with, and be accountable to, affected people. It is primarily for staff who are responsible for the official social media channels in their organization. Related topics, such as social media marketi
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ng or fundraising, are not covered in this guide. Also, keep in mind that social media does not replace other forms of communication, but is merely an additional channel through which you can engage affected communities." (Page 1)
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"In this report, developed with support from Facebook, we focus on an approach to extract public value from social media data that we believe holds the greatest potential: data collaboratives. Data collaboratives are an emerging form of public-private partnership in which actors from different secto
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rs exchange information to create new public value. Such collaborative arrangements, for example between social media companies and humanitarian organizations or civil society actors, can be seen as possible templates for leveraging privately held data towards the attainment of public goals. Existing research on data collaboratives is sparse, but a number of recent examples show how social media data can be leveraged for public good. These include Facebook’s sharing of population maps with humanitarian organizations following natural disasters; predicting adverse drug reactions through social media data analysis in Spain; and the city of Boston’s use of crowdsourced data from Waze to improve transportation planning. These examples and 9 additional cases are discussed in the full report. By assessing these examples, we identify five key value propositions behind the use of social media data for public goals: 1. Situational awareness and response; 2. Knowledge creation and transfer; 3. Public service design and delivery; 4. Prediction and forecasting; 5. Impact assessment and evaluation." (Pages 6-7)
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"This inventory was developed by FHI 360, with grant funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, to support resilience practitioners and the broader development community to identify digital technologies that have the potential to enhance resilience outcomes, particularly in Asia. It was primarily popu
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lated through a crowdsourced call for submissions that took place in March 2017. Given the crowdsourced nature of this inventory, responsibility for the accuracy of the content rests solely with the individuals who made submissions." (Introduction)
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"Crisis Communications: A Casebook Approach presents case studies of organizational, corporate, and individual crises, and analyzes the communication responses to these situations. Demonstrating how professionals prepare for and respond to crises, as well as how they develop communications plans, th
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is essential text explores crucial issues concerning communication with the news media, employees, and consumers in times of crisis. Author Kathleen Fearn-Banks addresses how to choose the best possible words to convey a message, the best method for delivering the message, and the precise and most appropriate audience, in addition to illustrating how to avoid potential mismanagement. The fifth edition of Crisis Communications includes updated cases that provide wider coverage of international crises and media technologies. It includes a new section on social media in crisis communication scenarios and includes additional comments from social media experts throughout various chapters. New case studies include "Police Departments and Community Trust," "The Oso Mudslide in Washington," "School Shootings: Communications To and For Children," and two additional international case studies - "Ebola Strikes Liberia: Firestone Strikes Ebola" and "Nut Rage and Korean Airlines." (Publisher description)
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"This study provides insights that can inform disaster communication management, policymaking, and theory building through a nationally representative field experiment (N = 2,015 U.S. adults) grounded in media richness theory, information and communication technologies (ICTs) succession theory, and
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the social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model. Key findings include the following: (1) Significant main effects of disaster information source were detected on how likely participants were to seek further disaster information from TV, local government websites, and federal government websites; (2) regardless of information form and source, participants reported strongest intentions to immediately communicate about the disaster predominately via offline interpersonal forms rather than through online organizational and personal forms; and (3) regardless of information source, participants reported strong intentions to evacuate if instructed to do so by the government. These findings call for developing crisis communication theory that is more focused on how publics communicate with each other rather than with organizations about disasters and predict a wider variety of crisis communication outcomes." (Abstract)
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"Social media is an invaluable source of time-critical information during a crisis. However, emergency response and humanitarian relief organizations that would like to use this information struggle with an avalanche of social media messages that exceeds human capacity to process. Emergency managers
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, decision makers, and affected communities can make sense of social media through a combination of machine computation and human compassion - expressed by thousands of digital volunteers who publish, process, and summarize potentially life-saving information. This book brings together computational methods from many disciplines: natural language processing, semantic technologies, data mining, machine learning, network analysis, human-computer interaction, and information visualization, focusing on methods that are commonly used for processing social media messages under time-critical constraints, and offering more than 500 references to in-depth information." (Publisher description)
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