Flexible Crowd-Driven Decision Making in Times of Crisis

Abstract

In times of crisis, making efficient decisions needs an accurate awareness of the event context and strongly depends on the effective use and coordination of resources, people, and information, where information is owned by either response organizations or non-crisis expert public. In this age of advanced collaborative technologies, citizens' participation to the crisis management process has shifted from the passive one-way contribution of social networking data to more active participation by performing specific tasks related to crisis-data processing. This chapter presents a comprehensive approach for integrating the crowdsourcing process to the collaborative decisional process in crisis situations. Application of the proposal with a real-world case study of the desert locust plague provides evidence of the enabling role that the crowdsourcing paradigm plays in supporting decision makers within desert locust control organizations operating throughout vast, remote, and geographically problematic areas.