2013 International Workshop on Social Computing for Collective Action (SCCA-2013)

Society has not taken full advantage of social computing to achieve goal-driven cooperative behaviors. Social media has been successful in drawing attention to situations, such as the "Arab Spring" and "Occupy Wall Street" movements that were initially under-represented by traditional sources of information. However, the role that social networking played in affecting the behavior of the grassroots efforts remains unclear. For example, the Occupy Wall Street movement used a general assembly to allow the whole community in attendance to share in democratic decision-making. However, no communication mechanisms were used to enable geographically distributed participants to contribute. The potential for social computing to support collective action can be observed by the "Occupy Sandy" community of volunteers, who applied their grassroots approach to address needs after Hurricane Sandy. While they used social media to announce needs, they still relied on small groups using limited distribution methods (e.g. a giant pad of newsprint) to coordinate their response. After the Haitian Earthquake of 2010, social computing applications were used to assist crisis response groups by identifying and prioritizing needs, but were unable to address ad hoc resource coordination to fulfill those needs.