Social Media for Situational Awareness: Joint-Interagency Field Experimentation

Social Media for Situational Awareness (SMSA) — the identification, tracking, and analysis of online social computing data in collaboration with other kinds of sensor data towards the derivation of ‘actionable’ intelligence, has recently become one of the key focuses of the Joint Interagency Field Experiment (JIFX), a regularly held event developed and facilitated by the Naval Postgraduate School. In this paper we describe: the structure of SMSA experimentation at JIFX, a situational awareness capabilities assessment, the outcomes of a SM shared task, and an integrated-technology scenario focusing on pandemic outbreak. We discuss an outline of potential future avenues for SMSA experimental designs to aid in the assessment and promotion of the use of technology for the derivation of intelligence from non-traditional sources during crises.