GNGTS 2023 - Atti del 41° Convegno Nazionale

Session 2.3 GNGTS 2023 A successful experience of volunteer crowdsourcing via social media to enhance knowledge for seismic risk reduction A. Saraò, A. Tamaro, D. Sandron, D. Slejko and A. Rebez Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale - OGS (Italy) Volunteer crowdsourcing information provides bottom-up knowledge that is potentially useful for disaster management in terms of monitoring and assessing the built environment. The crowdsourcing process begins with the collection of information from citizens, under the assumption that the collected information from many citizens will enhance professional knowledge (Bonney et al., 2016). Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide great potential for collecting and analyze information directly. However, social media platforms spread large amounts of false information and rumors. Although crowdsourcing is gaining popularity in the disaster reduction context, the compatibility of disaster preparedness and crowdsourcing by volunteers is an under-researched area (Kankanamge et al., 2019). Several studies (e.g., Fallou et al., 2020) have already demonstrated that seismology is one of the research areas where citizen science projects successfully gather useful scientific information. When an earthquake affects a populated area, a need for information immediately arises in the population. The ubiquity of smartphones provides an opportunity to involve even more citizens than before, who voluntarily send and share information out of an emotional impulse. When people post comments on social media immediately after an earthquake, it is out of a need to share and receive information from others. This willingness, which occurs immediately after experiencing an earthquake, has been used to model the spatial distribution of macroseismic intensity assuming a known magnitude and hypocenter (De Rubeis et al., 1992; Atkinson and Wald, 2007; Sbarra et al., 2010; Sbarra et al., 2012). The acquisition of seismic intensity reports takes up to a few minutes and is analyzed to understand the potential impact of the earthquake on the population. The "Did You Feel It?" (Wald et al. 1999) was one of the first Internet-based scientific crowd-sourcing initiatives. Nowadays, smartphone apps allow users to send a report about an earthquake they experienced (e.g., Bossu et al., 2018), similar to macroseismic intensity questionnaires collected through websites (Atkinson and Wald, 2007; Tosi et al., 2015). This information is shared by citizens on a voluntary basis, but also by trained personnel, such as emergency response volunteers (Sandron et al., 2021).