From situational awareness to actionability: Towards improving the utility of social media data for crisis response

People are increasingly sharing information on social media during disaster events. This information could be valuable to emergency responders, but there remain challenges for using it to inform response efforts—including filtering relevant information from the large volumes of noise. Previous research has largely focused on identifying information that can contribute to a generalized concept of situational awareness. Our work explores the value of approaching this problem from a different perspective—one of actionability—with the idea that information relevance may vary across responder role, domain, and other factors. This approach asks how we can get the right information to the right person at the right time. We interviewed and surveyed diverse responders to understand what “actionable” information is, allowing that actionability might differ from one responder to another. Through the findings, we (1) offer a nuanced understanding of actionability such that it complements existing approaches based on situational awareness; (2) describe responders’ perspective of what distinguishes good information when making rapid judgments; and (3) suggest opportunities for augmenting social media use to highlight information that needs immediate attention. We offer researchers an opportunity to frame different models of actionability to suit the requirements of a responding role.