Abstract: The increase of natural, industrial disasters and diverse crisis has stimulated more research interest to developing new forms of services support in the decision making process. To effectively prepare, mitigate and deal with such disasters, the prior of the people experiences involved in crisis preparedness and rescue need to be captured and used as a basis knowledge in existing and innovative services design. In this paper, we propose a scenario-based method for collecting and structuring the service user experience (UX), taking into account of the relevant user-service encounter through service touchpoints. The proposed method is applied to a crisis management case study.

Abstract: In the recent decade the evolvement and widespread success of new technologies in particular in the field of computing power, network bandwidth, mobile networks and wearable devices have prepared the foundation for completely new approaches in crisis management. Currently, we are at the edge that such new technologies for crisis management are becoming a real and practically applicable option, e.g. in the field of alerting, crowdsourcing, and crowdtasking. In parallel, we witness in the recent years that citizens are more and more willing to help during crisis and disasters, thus providing a large – yet unused – potential for agile support in disaster preparation and response. In many disaster situations the emergency personnel reach the limits of their capabilities. In particular during the isolation phase the support of such volunteers can be a valuable benefit for disaster response. With the help of new technologies crisis management can provide current on-site information via mobile devices in real time as well as organize and coordinate the activities of the volunteers at specific locations. In this paper we present the results of the research project ENSURE: a general architecture and a system design for the coordination of spontaneous volunteers for agile disaster response. With the expected broader implementation of such systems in disaster management in the future it is inevitable to elaborate such common technological foundations for practical mass applications.

Abstract: Major electricity breakdowns like the Northeast Blackout (USA) in 2003 or the blackout in most parts of Western Europe in 2005, have shown the fundamental role of electricity in our everyday life. The experiences of these accidents show that power suppliers, firefighters, police, county administration and citizens face multifarious challenges in inter-organizational communication, information and coordination processes during coping and recovery work. In this work-in-progress paper we describe early research dealing with inter-organizational issues in emergency management (EM). We are mainly focusing on supporting social practices in inter-organizational EM, for example collaborative interpretation of emergency situations, ad-hoc coordination or supporting citizen communication and helping routines. Identified from our experiences from related projects, discussions and literature studies, we suggest potential questions and future topics in user-driven software engineering processes for EM and domain specific problems, such as supporting citizen participation, coping with information uncertainties and quality variations or enhancing inter-organizational learning.

Abstract: This paper provides a task structure design for collaborative scenario elicitation. Task structure design is part of this effort to design a new Collaborative Scenario Creation (CSC) system. The complexity of the scenario creation process hinders participants, especially novice participants, from prudently designing scenarios. Research in Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) shows that task structure helps to improve processes and collaborations. To design task structure for collaborative scenario elicitation, this paper invokes the Entity-Relationship data modeling methodology.

Abstract: Despite the undeniable value of computer games as educational resources for teaching children, its actual application in educational processes is hampered due the complexity of their design and the high cost of developing them. In order to foster their adoption for emergency training, we propose a model for describing the different elements of an educational game for this domain. The model might serve to support the game designing process as well as a communication tool between educators and game designers. This way, the educator can specify the requirements of the educational experience he aims to construct, and based on that information the game designer can propose a set of possible configurations of the game elements that can help to attain the specified objectives.

Abstract: Crises range from global catastrophes to personal disasters. However, systematic inquiry on crises rarely employs a comparative approach to examine commonalities between these seemingly very different events. We argue here that individual psychosocial disasters can inform a broader discussion on crises. Our approach applies general crisis theory to a smartphone based psychosocial support system for US military veterans. We engaged in a process designed to explore how veteran peer-to-peer mentorship can be augmented with IS support to display potential early warning signs as first step toward preventative intervention for high risk behaviors. To gain a better understanding of how military veterans might benefit from such a system, this article focuses on a community collaborative design process. The co-design process used the Small Stories method, allowing important cultural characteristics of to emerge, illuminating considerations in IS design with military veterans, and highlighting how humans think about crisis events at the individual level.