Abstract: The Emergency Situation Awareness (ESA) tool began as a research study into automated web text mining to support emergency management use cases. It started in late 2009 by investigating how people respond on Twitter to specific emergency events and we quickly realized that every emergency situation is different and preemptively defining keywords to search for content on Twitter beforehand would likely miss important information. So, in late September 2011 we established location-based searches with the aim of collecting all the tweets published in Australia and New Zealand. This was the beginning of over a decade of collecting and processing tweets to help emergency response agencies and crisis coordination centres use social media content as a new channel of information to support their work practices and to engage with the community impacted by emergency events. This journey has seen numerous challenges overcome to continuously maintain a tweet stream for an operational system. This experience allows us to derive insights into the changing use of Twitter over this time. In this paper we present some of the lessons we’ve learned from maintaining a Twitter monitoring system for emergency management use cases and we provide some insights into the changing nature of Twitter usage by users over this period.

Abstract: All countries have to face the COVID’19 pandemic and its heavy consequences. This sanitary crisis differs from all others in terms of the quick spread of contaminations, the high number of deaths (more than 5,5 Million globally and 123,893 in France) and the accrued number of patients hospitalized and induced in intensive care units. All sanitary procedures have proven to be inadequate. Several actors at different levels, whether international, European, national and local, as well as at the level of public and private organizations have been involved in the management of this type of crisis. These actors deal with different aspects of it, i.e., health, people protection, and economic and social situations. Existing procedures revealed a big lack in the relationships between different local and departmental actors. We did a number of interviews with strategic actors addressing the COVID’19 crisis in the City of Troyes. The objective of these interviews is to identify lessons learned from their experience feedback about relational problems and modifications needed. We present in this paper the first results of this study.

Abstract: Several researchers and contingency agencies have suggested good practices for crisis management exercises. Resource-constrained practitioners in the field report difficulties finding cost-efficient ways to maintain exercise cycles. This paper draws on experiences from working with professional crisis response coordinators who adapted material for table-top exercises to learning management systems, executed the exercises and evaluated team performance. This paper discusses the elimination of bottlenecks and unexpected benefits arising from more flexible exercise designs in terms of synchrony, continuity, and location. While these concepts capture the essence of the various opportunities for flexibility, they need some supporting features in the design of digital exercises. This paper argues for putting emphasis on the writing/speech dichotomy when analysing exercise designs from the perspective of the entire exercise life cycle, including evaluations and preparations for further exercises. Additionally, how requests for individual answers are planned appears to be an effective instrument for efficient exercise design and evaluation during the conducting of an exercise.