Increasing efficiency of humanitarian organizations with volunteer driven information products

Kenny Meesters, B.A. van de Walle

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionScientificpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Emerging technologies provide new opportunities to humanitarian organizations for enhancing their response to crisis situations. Since the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, online volunteer communities have been activated to gather data and generate information products to improve humanitarian organizations' situational awareness and decision making. However, how and to what extent these information products influence the operations and organizational routines of the humanitarian organizations is a matter of considerable debate. In this paper we introduce an evaluation method to determine the impact of these new opportunities. Built on existing evaluation design principles for information systems, the resulting framework is used to identify the relevant impact factors in creating and using volunteer driven information products. Our results show that, despite the high response time and technical expertise, the organizational performance impact is inhibited by the limited embedding of volunteer driven information products in the organization. Using the presented evaluation tool the impact of other deployments can be determined and improved in a similar manner.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 47th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2014)
Place of PublicationHawaii
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages149-158
Number of pages10
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2014
Event47th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Hilton Waikoloa, Big Island, Hawaii, United States
Duration: 6 Jan 20149 Jan 2014

Conference

Conference47th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHawaii
Period6/01/149/01/14

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Increasing efficiency of humanitarian organizations with volunteer driven information products'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this