Architectural Considerations for Building a Robust Crowdsourced Disaster Relief Application

Social media has been a critical factor in providing improved disaster relief across the world in the past 15 years. However, our analysis of Chennai flood relief efforts revealed many downsides to the relief efforts based on social media such as inaccurate, inconsistent, incomplete, and stale information, user anonymity, information misuse, lack of geographical information etc. To address these issues, we propose the following technical, security, and operational considerations for building a robust disaster relief application. We classify the technical considerations into performance and resilience. Security considerations cover data integrity, trust, and privacy. Operational considerations include multilingual support, GIS support, data organization, live status updates, and disaster boundary demarcation. We illustrate these considerations in the context of Amrita-Kripa, a disaster relief application based on crowdsourcing. Amrita-Kripa was deployed during 2018 and 2019 Kerala floods and provided relief to thousands of victims.