News Story

Collective Platform for Community Resilience & Social Innovation During Crises

Harith Alani, Friday 15 Jan 2016

Response to crisis often reveals organisational and technological shortcomings, which threaten community recovery and sustainable. Even though some technological solutions exist, challenges of communication, interoperability, and data analytics remain. The rise of social media as an information channel during crisis has become key to community resilience and response. This project will build an intelligent collective resilience platform to help communities to reconnect, respond, and recover from crisis situations. COMRADES will achieve this through an interdisciplinary, socio-technical approach, which will draw on the latest advances in computational social science, social computing, real-time analytics, text and social media analysis, and Linked Open Data.

The open source COMRADES platform will extend the now standard data collection, mapping, and manual analysis functions provided by the underpinning, widely used Ushahidi crisis mapping tool, to include new intelligent algorithms aimed at helping communities, citizens, and humanitarian services with analysing, verifying, monitoring, and responding to emergency events. COMRADES platform will be deployed and evaluated with multiple, local and distributed, communities, using collective multilingual crisis information.

COMRADES is €2M project, funded by the European Commission under the CAPS (Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation) call. Project partners are OU, University of Sheffield, University of Agder, iHub, and Gov2u. COMRADES will run for three years, under the co-ordination of Dr Harith Alani from KMi.