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Researchers have established the prominent role digital volunteers play during crises and disasters. From self‐organizing to annotating public data, these volunteers are now a fixture in disaster research. However, we know much less about how these volunteers function, behind the public scene, when using private social media as a disaster unfolds and people need to be rescued. This qualitative study identified the emergent helping roles along with the skillsets and abilities that helped volunteers perform these behind‐the‐scene roles during the Hurricane Harvey flooding in 2017. Using in‐depth interviews along with captured images in private social media, we find these volunteers resembled organizational knowledge workers. We identify nine specific communicating and coordinating actions that these disaster knowledge workers performed. The contributions of these findings centre on implications for disaster response and management.

This research develops a model of mobile social network dispersion in rescue communication, and illustrates how people use a combination of mobile and social media, along with real-time communication, in their decision-making process. Guided by established research on smartphones, social media, and affordances, we used a qualitative approach and conducted field interviews that included photo-elicitation interview (PEI) techniques to examine participants’ private social media data. Our analysis of these rescue decisions reveals why so few people used the official 9-1-1 system. We show how rescue communication often occurs through a socially constructed assessment of risk that involves persuasion by trusted others in their network, regardless of professional qualifications. Furthermore, trusted others can function as proxies and can draw upon mobile social network affordances, helping to compensate for material limitations. The affordances people drew from can be organized into two sets: foundational and amplification. Hierarchical relationships exist among these sets of affordances, and materiality plays a pivotal role in rescue communication. Ultimately, our analysis uncovers the multimodality around people’s decisions to ask for help.