Collaborative analytics and brokering in digital humanitarian response

During large scale humanitarian crises, relief practitioners identify data used for decision making and coordination, as critical to their operations. Implicit in this need is the required capabilities for analyzing data. Given the rapidly evolving systems of collaborative data management and analysis in digital humanitarian efforts, information scientists and practitioners alike are keen to understand the role of data analytics in response operations. Through a case study of a digital humanitarian collaborative effort, we examine the processes for big and small data analytics, specifically focusing on data development, sharing, and collaborative analytics. Informed by theories of articulation work and collaborative analytics, we analyze data from indepth interviews with digital humanitarians. Our findings identify key practices and processes for collaborative analytics in resource constrained environments, particularly the role of brokering, and in turn generate design recommendation for collaborative analytic platforms.