The social networks that comprise our local communities can be critical for helping individuals, households, and business respond, overcome, and recover from natural disasters such as floods. Traditionally these networks are based on direct and indirect face-to-face interpersonal relationships often clustered within geographically defined communities. However, in the digital era we have seen the rapid transformation of social networks challenging traditional notions of community and our understanding of the roles community-based social networks play in disaster situations. If digital technologies play a crucial role in facilitating a new wave of social networking, how might these networks augment and enhance more community based networks' response to disasters? Will people and households utilize their traditional community or geographical based vs digital/virtual networks in disaster contexts? To what extent do these networks overlap and reinforce each other? And, what kinds of infrastructure can, and should, be built to create an augmented social-spatial-online network system for disaster resilience? To study these and related questions this Smart and Connected Communities (SCC) project will conduct an interdisciplinary investigation into multi-layer social networking patterns for information dissemination in disaster situations overlaying social, geographical and digital networks and organize a multi-state community-engaged workshop that will help build a framework for evaluating the infrastructure needs and robustness of augmented social networking for digitally and geographically disconnected communities. The project will target rural-to-urban communities located within three Midwest US watershed regions, which have been frequently affected by natural disasters in Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. The results of the pilot study will be shared, evaluated, and refined through a series of community interactions, including the community workshop and direct research engagements. Ultimately, this project will catalyze new research collaborations within the STEM work force in the under-served disaster-prone US communities that can help develop interdisciplinary technological innovations for building augmented social networking systems enhancing disaster response and resilience in the United States.

The specific aims of the project are: (1) to study statistical models that capture the dissemination of information in multiple online social networks, and the roles of geographical connectedness of the communities during the information dissemination; (2) to learn the structure of traditional community-based social networks, along with statistical models for information propagation in these networks; and, (3) to investigate how different types of networks compose for different community-disaster related scenarios. Much of the current literature on disaster focuses on crowdsourced social media which shows a lack of localized, spatial and social variations of community structures. The investigators will develop robust insights into how a geographical approach contributes to online social network models. Our study will provide a new and interdisciplinary approach for connecting the current social network models to the traditional community configurations in different social and physical circumstances by multifaceted evaluation of modeling with hybrid statistical, spatial and temporal models. A key element in this project is to better understand the technological innovations necessary to enhance spatial and digital social network for disaster resilience. Ultimately, by addressing the current limitations of information propagation systems, this project will help increase the robustness of online and physical infrastructure systems for disaster resilience across a wide range of community structures.

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.