A mixed interaction platform for supporting large-scale crisis storytelling

Crowdsourcing is a distributed approach in which people participate and share information over the Web (e.g. Facebook or Twitter). This distributed model has proved to be helpful in accelerating the perception of what occurred, where it happened, and who needed help in recent disasters such as the Boston Marathon bombs, the Oklahoma tornado or the Central Europe floods. Nevertheless, this kind of sources might provide unreliable, partial, ambiguous and inconsistent information that do not necessarily help to understand the situation. An alternative may be the combination of crowdsourcing activities and more official flows of information to make up a coherent big picture that support the needs of decision makers. This paper introduces a software approach conceived to convey stories created from different sources -official and unofficial- as a way of depicting situations in a collaborative manner.