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.