The past twenty years have seen broad popularization of a relatively novel kind of human enterprise: open collaboration. Open collaboration projects are distributed, collaborative efforts made possible because of changes in information and communication technology that facilitate cooperative activities. The groundswell of open collaboration could be felt in the open source movement of the 90s but became unmistakable with the growth of projects like Wikipedia and, in particular, the maturation of research to help explain how and why such systems work, who participates, and when they might fail. By now thousands of scholars have written about open collaboration systems, many hundreds of thousands of people have participated in them, and millions of people use products of open collaboration every day. This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist assembles interdisciplinary scholarship that examines different aspects of open collaboration and the diverse systems that support it. The goal of this short introductory piece is to define open collaboration and contextualize a set of articles that span multiple disciplines and methods in a common vocabulary and history. We provide a definition of open collaboration and situate the phenomenon within an interrelated set of scholarly and ideological movements. We then examine the properties of open collaboration systems that have given rise to research and review major areas of scholarship, including the works in this issue, and close with a

the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration. The discourse on Haiti is both vast and varied with public attention soaring when an earthquake hit the island in January 2010. Many questions have since been raised by global stakeholders as to how the situation was handled. The primary purpose of this work is to investigate communication cycles between aid organizations and the Haitian community, and to compare the effects on the execution of projects during and after the crisis. The objective is to gain entry into the psyche of both the helpless and the helper, and to show that socio-cultural immersion makes for better trust building which as a direct derivative, smoothes the communication exchange between aid organization teams and the host community. Information was gathered in the narrative style, with story-telling as the major tool for collecting vital cues on thoughts, feelings, and expectations of respondents. This technique is particularly appropriate in Haiti's cultural context where stories are an integral part of social record-keeping. From the narrations, insightful answers are found to the research questions

ABSTRACT This paper describes the design, execution, and results of a participatory design workshop with emergency public information officers (PIOs). During the workshop, PIOs and researchers explored ideas and designs for supporting the social media needs of PIO work. Results indicate that PIO perceptions of social media have changed as they have learned to incorporate activities of the public into their work, yet they still struggle with issues of trust and liability. Based on workshop design activities, the paper offers a set of design recommendations for supporting the social media needs of PIO work practice such as the ability to monitor, document, and report social media activity.

ABSTRACT In this paper we present Aurorasaurus: a website, a mobile application, and a citizen science initiative that allows a community of users to report and verify sightings of the Aurora Borealis. Through ad-hoc data indirectly offered through social media, a community of citizen scientists verify sightings of the Aurora Borealis. These verified data are tested against currently existing aurora-forecasting models. The insights these data provide are transformed into map and text-based forms. In addition, notifications are sent to interested participants in a timely manner. This is a design test-bed for an early warning system (EWS) that is capable of detecting and communicating the earliest signs of disaster to community members in near real time. Most importantly, this system incorporates community participation in improving the quality of data mined from Twitter and direct community contributions.

Abstract. The objective of the LORELEI Situation Frame task is to aggregate information from multiple data streams -including social media -into a comprehensive, actionable understanding of the basic facts needed to mount a response to an emerging situation. Rather than evaluating these capabilities in English, LORELEI is particularly concerned with advancing human language technology performance for low resource languages. The combination of domain, genre and language requirements make creation of linguistic resources for LORELEI in general, and the Situation Frame task in particular, especially challenging. Data is by definition relatively scarce for these languages, and real operational data may be impossible to come by, necessitating the use of "proxy" data sources. The annotation task itself, while superficially straightforward, requires navigating many difficult decisions involving the use of inference and the presence of widespread ambiguity and under-specification in the source data. We introduce the Situation Frame annotation task in the context of the goals of the larger LORELEI program, explore some of the most prevalent annotation challenges, and discuss the impact of various data types on annotation consistency. The data described in this paper will be made available to the wider research community after its use in LORELEI program evaluations.

This chapter reports on the challenges and opportunities made possible by social media in the field of emergency management. First, we consider the emergency practitioner and the challenges they face when using social media: difficulties in verifying social media data, liability risks, information overload, and a lack of resources to manage social media communications and data. To address these challenges, we propose the use of performance measures, standards, best practices, digital volunteers, training, and exercises. Attention then turns to the research around social media in times of crisis. This research investigates public activity (citizen reporting, community-oriented computing, and collective intelligence and distributed problem solving) and demonstrates how social media have shaped—and continue to shape—perceptions around how members of the public can participate in an emergency. We then look at research that studies emergency management organizations as they seek to understand how social media might be used in their practice. We conclude with descriptions of future research directions and next-generation tools for monitoring and extracting information from social media. Finally, we discuss the differences between practice and research perspectives and discuss how these differences can make it difficult to reach consensus regarding social media’s role in emergency response. We advocate that as practice and research work together expanding the research agenda, understanding roles, building relationships, considering organizational fit, and developing best practices, they will advance knowledge about the potential and realities of social media and move toward envisioning how social media may be used as a resource in emergency management.