Crisis mapping and crowdsourcing in flood management
This publication looks at crowdsourcing as an innovative and useful approach for facilitating crisis-mapping as a whole. Benefits and potentialities as well as limits and possible strategy solutions are examined. A selection of existing tools and their target user groups are surveyed, and a cycle approach is introduced for exploring possible uses of crisis-mapping and crowdsourcing in flood management.
Crowdsourcing is broadly defined as the process of obtaining information, ideas and services from a large group of people, and has become closely linked to the rapidly developing Internet and social media landscape. Crisis mapping, meanwhile, involves the collection, display and analysis of relevant data during a crisis, with varying intensity of development, from slow-burn crises to sudden-onset disasters.
The crisis map is a real-time gathering, display and analysis of data during a crisis, including political, social and environmental ones, having different development intensity (from slowburn crises to sudden-onset disasters). Crisis-mapping allows a large number of people to control, even at a distance, the carrying out of a crisis, by providing information to manage it.
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