Digital Resilience Hubs are trusted online communities that are prepared to activate in response to disasters, but serve varied needs for their communities at other times.

They support on-the-ground Resilience Hubs and official responders by gathering, verifying, and distributing information, managing public communication, and addressing rumors & misinformation.

They are committed to the training, certification, and upkeep necessary to build the trust of the public, their peers in digital and disaster communities, and responding officials.

The Hawaiʻi Tracker Project serves as a model DRH, having grown from the experiences and lessons of the 2018 Kīlauea eruption response.

DRHs aim to leverage a group’s established social media profile and bolster it, requiring a degree of familiarity with social media before consideration.

As a non-binding guide-line, the number of memberships or subscriptions should exceed 10% of the population of the area served by the group. To reach this level of success, a group must have invested time in their community. Other groups may be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Some standards of moderation should already be established and accepted by the online community. Individual groups may have different rules on what is acceptable, and that’s ok – each group is best situated to determine what works for their community.

For forums, some form of user management should be in place, where users must apply to participate in the group. For pages, protections should be in place to prevent unscreened accounts from participating on the page.

DRH certification requires at least one group administrator to complete HVERI’s top-level Social Media Moderator In Disasters training. This first consists of a half-day seminar that formalizes concepts and sets standards and operations for DRHs. Guarding against AI-assisted threats and using AI tools are also included.

For two subsequent weeks, candidates then practice these principles as moderators under mentorship on the Hawaiʻi Tracker Facebook Group, a Hawaiʻi Island-focused community of 121,900 subscribers.

Successful completion results in certification for individuals, but DRH certification also requires disaster simulation training with other DRHs and coordinators on the network, Civil Defense, Vibrant Hawaiʻi, and physical RHs.

• Improve the safety of your family, neighbors and friends by distributing emergency information

• Ensure your community’s knowledge can support official responders

• Free training on social media moderation and AI topics

• Potential financial support to staff your group sufficiently to respond to disasters