# Town-Watching Workshop Using Disaster Information Tweeting and Mapping System +
## 1 Introduction  
Over the last decade, social media has played an increasingly important role in spreading information globally during and after large-scale disasters [1]. Certain studies have reported the utilization of social media posts emergency dispatches [2; 3]. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) fordisaster response has been studied [4; 5]. The integration of social media data and the GIS applications have become important for disaster preparedness and mitigation. Twitter is one of the top five social media platforms that facilitates information sharing concerning recent disasters [1; 6; 7]. A large number of Twitter users posted to share the disaster-related information actively during major emergency events such as the Haiti earthquake, Hurricanes Sandy, Harvey, Irma, and Maria, the Boston Marathon bombing, and typhoon Haiyan [8; 9; 10]. Many Twitter posts (tweets) included disaster hashtags such as \"#sandy,\" \"#hurricane,\" \"#haiyan,\" and \"#ttyphoonhaiyan\" during the events. The hashtags are used for information search and collection [11]. Moreover, many applications and systems utilizing Twitter have been proposed for emergency management [12]. In Japan, large-scale natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods frequently occur. A large number of posts (tweets), such as damage-related situations and rescue requests, have been posted on Twitter during recent disasters, including the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake, 2017 Northern Kyushu Flood, and 2018 Japan Flood (July 2018 Heavy Rain Disaster) [13; 14; 15; 16]. To utilize tweets for disaster response, users need to provide information about the accurate location or address and photos about the event. However, the users may still face difficulties in distributing this information owing to the urgency surrounding the event. While a system is required for collecting and displaying the posted information efficiently, the urgency surrounding these disasters may prevent achieving this objective. To overcome these problems, we developed a Disaster Information Tweeting/Mapping System (DITS/DIMS) [17; 18] to facilitate easy posting and sharing of disaster-related information on Twitter. This system is accessible on any web browser of any smartphone. While DITS enables users to post disaster-related information on Twitter, DIMS allows users to display a map of tweets posted using DITS. A large-scale natural disaster causes a lot of damage over a wide area simultaneously, thus the capacity of the local governments, fire fighters, rescue parties, and police officers may be exceeded. Therefore, self- and mutual-help by citizens are important for disaster prevention and mitigation as well as public-help from the local governments. Thus, town watching and disaster prevention map-making workshops were held to review the town and promote self- and mutual-help by citizens [19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25]. Moreover, web systems for facilitating such town watching workshops have been proposed [26; 27]. Although the utilization of social media for information sharing has received considerable attention, the proposed systems do not share information on social media or social networking services (SNS). Therefore, the town watching workshop using DITS/DIMS is a meaningful opportunity for information sharing in terms of disaster prevention and mitigation. Thus, we organized a disaster prevention educational program for junior and senior high school students using DITS/DIMS [28]. DITS/DIMS was adopted for the program because of the following reasons:  
* Facilitate phases of map making and a presentation in town watching. * Increase the popularity of the system by educating people about using the system. * Use of social media or SNS to disseminate information during an emergency through posts on Twitter. In this study, we report a town-watching workshop using DITS/DIMS held on 6 October 2018 for the community in Makomanai area, Minami Ward, Sapporo City, Hokkaido, Japan. This was our first town-watching workshop that targeted a local community.