SCC-PG: Trust Formation and Risk Communication in Underserved Communities during Compound Hazard Events through Online and Offline Social Networks (TRUCHE)

University Of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Norman OK

Investigators

Abstract

Responding to risk events involves interactions among diverse stakeholders (e.g. government agencies, non-profit organizations, community residents). Such interactions are typically unbalanced and inefficiently organized, which leads to coordination failures and inefficient response. Community-based social networks offer a critical resource during crisis response, whose capacity has been significantly enhanced with the ubiquitous usage of social media and smart devices. The challenge is to enable innovative, community-based coordination mechanisms that allow sharing risk and information without undermining each other. The project offers a community-wide risk assessment and protective action decision-making framework that takes into account the risk sharing and trust building tradeoffs in online (i.e. internet, social media) and offline (i.e. face-to-face) social networks. The proposed project considers underserved tribal communities in Oklahoma as a testbed for building conceptual and operational frameworks to demonstrate how such networks can facilitate more effective and scalable risk sharing to provide complementary pathways to resilience. This SCC-PG will help public authorities and non-profit organizations communicate with their target audience in a more effective and efficient way during one or more hazard events. Accurate and actionable messages about hazardous events are key to saving lives, minimizing adverse impacts in at-risk communities, and creating more proactive and resilient communities. Community-based social networks offer a critical resource during crisis response, however the challenge is to enable innovative, community-based coordination mechanisms that would allow more proactive sharing of risk information through online (i.e. internet, social media) and offline (i.e. face-to-face) social networks. The primary goal of this Smart and Connected Communities (SCC) Panning Grant (SCC-PG) is to lay a foundation for a risk sharing network that will fundamentally advance the understanding of how a system of diverse actors at different levels of social system, embedded with smart and social media tools, collectively generate community resilience. The project’s interdisciplinary team will organize a series of activities to develop the foundation for a risk sharing network for the underserved tribal communities in Oklahoma that will produce a set of actionable insights and operations for promoting resilience. Specific tasks include: (1) Building a comprehensive understanding of the interactive features of community-based risk and information sharing processes with key stakeholders’ engagement; and (2) Advancing coherent theoretical and computational insights from several strands of scientific literature to develop effective coordination mechanisms among diverse actors in a social system. The project will generate transformative knowledge that will be instrumental in responding to future crisis events. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.