About
- Project Coordinator: Prof Harith Alani, Knowledge Media institute, Open University (UK)
- Project Start: 1 January 2016
- Duration: 36 months
- Project Budget: €1999021,25
- 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
Providing intelligent Information and Communication technologies to boost community resilience, by increasing the ability of a community to take collective actions, and to utilise available resources to self-organise and respond to crises.
- Community Engagement
Platform will be designed and created bottom-up by communities. Project will run several co-design and engagement events with communities, along with theoretical research.
- Informativeness of Citizen Reports
During crises, a very large number of messages are often posted on various social media platforms by using the hashtags dedicated to the crises at hand. COMRADES will produce a set of automatic filters, to efficiently and intelligently identify the messages of sufficient relevance and value.
- Content and Source Validity Assessment
Falsified crises and emergency reports are amongst the biggest concerns of humanitarians and communities towards using social media content during crisis. COMRADES will develop methods to help responders with assessing the validity of content and its source and also provide responders with means for alerting the community through the COMRADES platform and social media of unreliable content and information sources currently circulating.
- Crisis Event Modelling Detection
COMRADES will develop tools and algorithms for automatically and accurately detecting, modelling, and matchmaking emergency events.
- Participatory Community Innovation during crises
The services and platform will be open source using open and linked data, thus facilitating the extension of the platform to other application areas. The COMRADES platform will be accessible over the Web and mobile devices.
What’s in it for me?
The platform will encourage 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 crises reports (community reporters), to produce and access filtered and quality collective information, and to be connected with others based on emergency needs and offers.
COMRADES will involve citizens at two levels:
- By engaging multiple communities in the requirements, design, and evaluation tasks and
- By producing a platform to be primarily used by the citizens, to help their communities and fellow citizens. The platform will be based on Ushahidi; a common platform for crises mapping, developed in collaboration with iHub.
COMRADES will engage with three communities that are core to effective resilience efforts;
- Activists (platform deployers): individuals and groups of people who set up instances of the community platform.
- Responders: communities that organise and coordinate resources and provide expertise when the platform is deployed.
- Reporters: communities who report on crisis.
