About
COMRADES was a project about creating an open‐source, community resilience platform, designed by communities, for communities, to help them reconnect, respond to, and recover from crisis situations.
The aim of COMRADES was to build a next-generation platform to:
- Extract, group, and monitor unfolding emergency micro-events.
- Quickly filter citizen reports as they arrived from social media and mobile texts
- Remove uninformative and irrelevant ones
- Point out unreliable sources
- Pick up and alert responders to several lone messages requesting urgent help during a crisis
COMRADES (Collective Platform for Community Resilience and Social Innovation during Crises) aimed to empower communities with intelligent socio-technical solutions to help them reconnect, respond to, and recover from crisis situations.
Project Analysis:
Project Coordinator: Prof. Harith Alani, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University (UK)
Project Start: 1 January 2016
Duration: 36 months
Project Budget: €1,999,021.25
Call: H2020-ICT-2015
Topic: ICT-10-2015: Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation
Type of action: Research & Innovation Actions (RIA)
Goals of COMRADES
Community Resilience
COMRADES provided intelligent Information and Communication Technologies to boost community resilience by increasing the ability of a community to take collective actions and utilize available resources to self-organize and respond to crises.
Community Engagement
The platform was designed and created bottom-up by communities. The project ran several co-design and engagement events with communities, along with theoretical research.
Informativeness of Citizen Reports
During crises, a large number of messages were posted on various social media platforms using hashtags dedicated to the crises at hand. COMRADES produced a set of automatic filters to efficiently and intelligently identify messages of sufficient relevance and value.
Content and Source Validity Assessment
Falsified crises and emergency reports were among the biggest concerns of humanitarians and communities regarding the use of social media content during crises. COMRADES developed methods to help responders assess the validity of content and its sources and provided responders with means for alerting the community through the COMRADES platform and social media about unreliable content and information sources in circulation.
Crisis Event Modelling Detection
COMRADES developed tools and algorithms for automatically and accurately detecting, modelling, and matchmaking emergency events.
Participatory Community Innovation during Crises
The services and platform were open source, using open and linked data, thus facilitating the extension of the platform to other application areas. The COMRADES platform was accessible via the Web and mobile devices.
What Was in It for Users?
The platform encouraged community-wide participation by enabling local (communities in crisis zones) and remote (digital activists and responders) individuals and communities to come together and share knowledge through their crisis reports (community reporters), produce and access filtered and quality collective information, and connect with others based on emergency needs and offers.
COMRADES involved citizens at two levels:
- By engaging multiple communities in the requirements, design, and evaluation tasks.
- By producing a platform primarily used by citizens to help their communities and fellow citizens. The platform was based on Ushahidi, a common platform for crisis mapping, developed in collaboration with iHub.
COMRADES engaged with three communities that were core to effective resilience efforts:
- Activists (platform deployers): Individuals and groups who set up instances of the community platform.
- Responders: Communities that organized and coordinated resources and provided expertise when the platform was deployed.
- Reporters: Communities that reported on crises
Partners
Knowledge Media institute
Ushahidi
University of Sheffield
TU DelftGovernment to You
Publications
Piccolo, L., Meesters, K. and Roberts, S. (2018) , 18th International Conference on Informatics and Semiotics in Organisations (ICISO) 2018, Reading, UK Building a Socio-technical Perspective of Community Resilience with a Semiotic Approach, in eds. Liu K., Nakata K., Li W., Baranauskas C., Digitalisation, Innovation, and Transformation. ICISO 2018. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 527, pp. 22-32, Springer
Piccolo, L., Roberts, S., Iosif, A. and Alani, H. (2018) Designing Chatbots for Crises: A Case Study Contrasting Potential and Reality, British HCI Conference, Belfast
Piccolo, L. and Pereira, R. (2017) Culture-based artefacts to inform ICT design: foundations and practice, AI & Society, Springer
Burel, G., Saif, H., Fernandez, M. and Alani, H. (2017) On Semantics and Deep Learning for Event Detection in Crisis Situations, Workshop: Workshop on Semantic Deep Learning (SemDeep), at ESWC 2017, Portoroz, Slovenia
Saif, H., Dickinson, T., Kastler, L., Fernandez, M. and Alani, H. (2017) A Semantic Graph-Based Approach for Radicalisation Detection on Social Media, Proc. Int. Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Portoroz, Slovenia, 10249, pp. 571-587, Springer
