Summary of social media research, Tatiana Indina Wilson Center, Washington DC

1. Self-organization of social networks
in emergency & crisis response
in Russia
PhD, Tatiana A. Indina
Wilson Center, Kennan Institute
March-2012

2. • SELF-ORGANIZED NETWORKS:
• How social networks become organized in
crisis situations? Russian cases
• Crowdsourcing movements: Can government
trust crowds?
• How on line crowds can be enabled for
emergency respond?

3. Disaster and crisis management
problems:
• How individuals interact within network and with the government?
How they become self-organized? How to increase effectiveness of
the crisis response?
• How to connect crowd and crown in crisis? how can we use social
media and crowd to help ? Improving communication between
crowd and crown; how would government enable and disable
crowds?
• Distribution of information in crisis: how does information flow?
How to make communication and information exchange more
efficient?
• How to make message work? Which are access points to the
network? Developing successful messaging strategies;
• How to bring action offline - how to engage volunteers? Creating
crowd sourcing regional leadership teams.

4. Research questions:
• Social media as a catalyst of crowd self-organization in
emergency; how does s- media effects crowd behavior;
• Self-organized group behavior (Mechanisms of online
and offline self-organization of social media users);
• Levels of engagement of online social media users to
offline behavior;
• Communication and messaging inside the network
(information gathering and dissemination);
• Identification and profiling of online leaders as a key
access points to self-organized networks;
• Interaction between “crowd and crown” through social
media in crisis;

5. Research steps: 1. Develop model of group
Memory behavior and self- organization in
crisis situations
Goal
CONSIOUSS SELF –
REGULATION MODEL OF
Criteria BEHAVIOR AND DECISION
Modeling system MAKING
Result (Self –regulation lab, PI RAO,
achievement Russia)
estimation
Programmi STRUCTURE-FUNCTIONAL
ng APPROACH:
Result information
• Goal of the activity;
• Subjective model and
Correction conditions;
• Program of the actions;
Program • Evaluation of results;
realization

6. 2. Investigate which role Social networks play in
group self-organization
how does social media affects group self-organization?
which factors determine social networks self-organization ?

7. 3. Analyze social networks self-organization in crisis response
(communication patterns, information exchange, behavior and
interaction)

8. Study of social networks behavior:
• What make people engaged in crowdsourcing
activism?
• How social networks become self-organized in
crisis situations? (key factors of success and
failure of crowd mobilization);
• Mechanisms and group dynamics of
communication within networks?
• Information flow and access points to the
network;
• Switching from online to action: How can
government enable crowds?

9. 4. Study of on line activism:
• Online activists and their role in enabling
social networks;
• Motives which drive online leaders’ actions;
• Liability of their messaging and information;
• Psychological profiling and typology of online
leaders.

10. Russian case studies:

11. Methodology:
• Social media monitoring (open source data);
• Content analysis of user generated content;
• Social network analysis;
• Structure equation models of users communication &
behavior;
• Group sociometry;
• Experimental behavior models and observations;
• Psychological profiling of network leaders;
• Case studies (post event analysis);

12. Results:
• Model of self-organized behavior of social
networks in crisis situation;
• Methods of identification and assessment
online leaders (key competences model);
• Methods to evaluate and improve networks
self-organization (communication, action,
information exchange) in crisis response.

13. Where can be applied:
• New solutions for emergency communications increasing situational
awareness and reactivity;
• Crowdsourcing alerts monitoring and evaluation;
• Communicating risks & disaster notifications (broadcast alerts; notification
service; crisis mapping);
• Communication with communities; diaspora mobilization;
• Improving communication platforms for social media and government;
• Coordination citizen gathered information;
• Improving humanitarian and emergency response;
• Increasing citizen science &public involvement;
• Connecting state and local agencies, relief organizations, government
agencies, social enterprise; researchers, general public and media for
protecting human security;
• Global mapping (evaluation of indexes of self-organization potential of
social networks across the countries: Russia, FSU, CA, USA);
• Training and development programs for specialists;

14. Contacts:
Tatiana A. Indina
E-mail: tatiana.indina@wilsoncenter.org
skype: tatiana.indiana
tel: 202-904-0941