Information School News

Last week, Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly, along with Dr Tina McGuiness from the Management School, ran an event for local schools entitled 'Could social media help you during a disaster?', as part of the 2017 ESRC Festival of Social Science. The description of the event was: Can social media help build disaster resilience in Sheffield? What role, if any, should social media users, and young people in particular, play in efforts to mitigate the effects of these incidents in their communities and help keep themselves and others safe? Recent research has suggested that social media can help emergency services during human made and natural disasters through the ‘push and pull’ of crisis information. The eyewitness perspectives shared by citizens on social media can help first responders build situational awareness and identify those areas most in need of assistance. At the same time, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can provide emotional and material support to those affec...

Dr Elisa Serafinelli presented the AESOP Guidelines for effective communication between Critical Infrastructure operators and members of the public during crisis situations at the IMPROVER project workshop that was held at the Joint Research Centre, in Ispra Italy on the 11th and 12th May 2017. Recommendations included: creating platforms and/or channels of communication that can provide feedback about CI operators’ services before, during and after a major incident. The guidelines was published along with the deliverables for task 4.2. Researchers, operators and the IMPROVER consortium joined forces for two days of presentations, knowledge sharing, and networking. The workshop was also an opportunity to present IMPROVER project activities and results in order to get feedback from critical infrastructures (CI) operators.

A paper co-authored by Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly, Research Associate Dr Elisa Serafinelli and their colleagues from EMSC was nominated for a prize at the 2017 ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) conference. This work, entitled 'Public expectations of social media use by critical infrastructure operators in crisis communication' and based on results from the EC H2020 IMPROVER project , explores public expectations of social media use by critical infrastructure operators during crisis situations. Previous research into the role of social media in crisis communication has tended to focus on how sites such as Twitter are used by emergency managers rather than other key stakeholders, such as critical infrastructure (CI) operators. This paper adds to this emergent field by empirically investigating public expectations of information provided by CI operators during crisis situations. It does so by drawing on key themes that emerged from a review ...