Engineering Crowdwork for Disaster Events: The Human-Centered Development of a Lost-and-Found Tasking Environment

Human computation and crowd sourcing have become hot topics across several application domains. Indeed, some efforts have been directed toward emergency management to find ways to involve the public in disaster response. However, many tasks in disaster response can put the public in harm\´s way or introduce problems of liability. Furthermore, some human computation tasks are disconnected from the true needs of emergency response. In this paper we discuss the case of an important lost-and-found task -- reuniting displaced pets with their owners after a disaster. We argue why this task is a strong candidate for human computation by "digital volunteers." The goal of this paper is to articulate the design decisions and software engineering problems faced in designing and developing a web-based crowd work environment that supports a lost-and-found matching task.