A new report from the Wilson Center’s Commons Lab, “Connecting Grassroots and Government for Disaster Response,” examines a growing problem confronting government agencies: how to quickly make sense of data from the emerging technologies that are now overloading disaster responders, including social media, satellite imagery, and community-curated maps.

The report was written by John Crowley, a public policy scholar with Commons Lab, consultant at the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery at The World Bank Group, and affiliated researcher with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

Disaster response officials are facing a new reality as citizens increasingly use tools that interconnect over mobile networks to rapidly share information via online maps and social media, then mobilize thousands of people to collect and analyze that information, Crowley says. This information can provide critical situational awareness to the responders who provide aid.

The new report looks at how to best connect these emerging volunteer groups with government agencies, with a particular focus on the legal, policy and technological challenges.

“The key to the successful use of a collective intelligence will be generating trust in the knowledge it creates—not just inside the government, but within the populations that may be affected by future disasters,” Crowley writes. “When [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] or [U.S. Agency for International Development] uses citizen-generated knowledge to make decisions around saving and sustaining life, citizens must trust that the data used to generate those decisions were the best available at the time.”

He continues, “The process of deciding when to use collective intelligence to augment traditional mechanisms of sense making will mediate how this trust is built.”