Social Informatics

This paper examines the workflow and sense-making activities of digital volunteers, showing how they acquire, assess, process and scrutinise crowdsourced information to warrant confidence that the data satisfies the standard of engagement, production and analysis. We do so by studying a digital disaster response organisation Humanity Road through fifteen response oper‐ ations across thirteen countries using digital ethnography over a period of sixteen months. This paper reports on the findings of this study, using a range of sources such as Skype chat logs, field notes, social media postings, and official documents. Our paper introduces a framework that offers a consistent and structured workflow for the communities of practice related to social media and data aggregation communities within the domain of Digital Humanitarian Networks. Our findings suggest practical implications for both the digital humanitarian organisations and government of the disaster-prone countries.