RE-ACTA

RE-ACTA

RE-ACTA was a research project that started in 2013 with the goal of improving resilience in all stages of disaster management, utilising new media and mobile handheld devices. A workflow was devised for distributing tasks to volunteers via smartphone application and visualising their feedback to generate a situation report. For updates visit the official project homepage.

In RE-ACTA, a new approach to crowd-tasking in disaster situations has been developed. "Crowd-Tasking" means the practice of assigning specific task to a group of volunteers who have been deliberately selected by criteria such as their current position or a set of skills. RE-ACTA tries to apply know-how in volunteer management that the Austrian Red Cross has gathered with Team Österreich, another successful initiative for community engagement, and apply it to crowd-tasking using new media technologies. The project yielded an extensive process model as well as a demonstrator implementation of core concepts. It was evaluated both under laboratory conditions and in the field.

Put very briefly, what RE-ACTA does is enable operators of disaster relief organisations to use volunteers for information gathering in the field. It offers a fast way of creating and distributing tasks aimed at situation reporting. Volunteers receive these tasks on their smartphones and execute a series of short steps. These may include taking a photo or answering a question per pre-defined answers. The volunteer's responses are visualised on an interactive map, giving an overview of the situation in observed regions.

The project, its results and implications have been discussed in three papers as of yet. If you want to know more about how RE-ACTA works and read some in-depth discussion about the approach, I would refer you to the following sources:

  • Auferbauer, D., Ganhör, R., Tellioglu, H. & Pielorz, J. Crowdtasking: Field Study on a Crowdsourcing Solution for Practitioners in Crisis Management, 2016, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
    Link (PDF)
  • Auferbauer, D., Czech, G., & Tellioglu, H. (2015). Communication Technologies in Disaster Situations: Heaven or Hell?, Security Research Conference: 10th Future Security Proceedings (pp. 25–32), Berlin, Germany.
    Link (PDF)
  • Auferbauer, D., Ganhör, R., & Tellioglu, H. Moving Towards Crowd Tasking for Disaster Mitigation, 2015, Proceedings of The 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Kristiansand, Norway.
    Link (PDF)
  • Flachberger, C., Neubauer, G., Ruggenthaler, C., & Czech, G. Crowd Tasking – Realising the Unexploited Potential of Spontaneous Volunteers, 2015, Security Research Conference: 10th Future Security Proceedings (pp. 9–16), Berlin, Germany
    Link (PDF)