Collaborative Information Seeking through Social Media Updates in Real-Time

Abstract

This paper describes co-located collaborative information seeking in the context of the Social Media Tracking Centre (SMTC) in Ghana. The SMTC was operational for three days during the Presidential elections in Dec 2016. The SMTC»s role was to collaboratively find and verify novel, actionable, and relevant information on social media and escalate it to the authorities to use that information to ensure a transparent and peaceful election process. We performed a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with the volunteers at the SMTC as well as its managing team. We present, in this paper, the importance of volunteer motivation and co-location in the success of the SMTC, as well as the users» feedback on the collaborative tool, informing future design, derived from our analysis.