What: Camille Cobb: Designing for the Deluge

When: Tuesday, Feb 25 @ 12 noon (Every other Tuesday this quarter)

Where: The Allen Center, CSE 203

Join us tomorrow for Change. This week Camille Cobb will be presenting recent work done at UW on designing for digital volunteers on social media.

Abstract

Social media is a potentially valuable source of situational awareness information during crisis events. Consistently, “digital volunteers” and others are coming together to filter and process this data into usable resources, often coordinating their work within distributed online groups. However, current tools and practices are frequently unable to keep up with the speed and volume of incoming data during large events. Through contextual interviews with emergency response professionals and digital volunteers, this research examines the ad hoc, collaborative practices that have emerged to help process this data and outlines strategies for supporting and leveraging these efforts in future designs. We argue for solutions that align with current group values, work practices, volunteer motivations, and organizational structures, but also allow these groups to increase the scale and efficiency of their operations. 

About the Speaker

Camille Cobb is a second year PhD student in CSE co-advised by Kate Starbird and Gaetano Borriello. She graduated in 2012 from Washington and Lee University with a BS in physics and a BA in computer science. She is originally from Charlotte, NC. Camille's is interested in interdisciplinary projects that have a motivation or application beyond computer science and has been working on this crisis related project since she started at UW.