Chasing The Chatter - VOST - Crowdsourcing - Social Monitoring

Photograph - Getty Images - nfpa.org - by Jesse Roman - July 1, 2019

Around the world, an army of volunteers equipped with little more than laptops monitors social media activity during all manner of emergencies. That work is contributing to a fundamental change in how safety agencies interact with the public during large-scale disasters.

. . . a virtual operations support team, or VOST community remains primarily a loosely affiliated network of do-gooder volunteers . . .

. . . Because the work is conducted online, VOST members can be located anywhere in the world . . .

. . . The general term for this work is social monitoring, a concept that has grown steadily since about 2010. Many forward-thinking disaster managers now see this digital sleuthing as critical to their on-the-ground efforts, regardless of the type of disaster they are facing.

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