Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief

Social media sites have proven useful in disaster relief for information propagation and communication. Crowdsourcing applications based on social media applications such as Twitter and Ushahidi provide a powerful capability for collecting information from disaster scenes and visualizing data for relief decision making. This article briefly describes the advantages and disadvantages of crowdsourcing applications applied to disaster relief coordination. It also discusses several challenges that need to be addressed to make crowdsourcing a useful tool that can effectively facilitate the relief progress in coordination, accuracy, and security. © 2011 IEEE.