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Recent disasters have shown an increase in the significance of social media for both affected citizens and volunteers alike in the coordination of information and organization of relief activities, often independently of and in addition to the official emergency response. Existing research mainly focuses on the way in which individual platforms are used by volunteers in response to disasters. This paper examines the use of social media during the European Floods of 2013 and proposes a novel cross-social-media application for volunteers. Besides comprehensive analysis of volunteer communities, interviews were conducted with "digital volunteers" such as Facebook moderators of disaster-related groups. Based on the challenges identified, we designed and implemented the cross-social-media application "XHELP", which allows information to be both, acquired and distributed cross-media and cross-channel. The evaluation with 20 users leads to further design requirements for applications aiming to support volunteer moderators during disasters.
Reuter et al. (Fri,) studied this question.