Abstract: Technological advances, such as software tools for citizen reporting, first responder support, and online collaborative information management and mapping, are enabling new or improved forms of volunteering in humanitarian crisis. However, the change is largely driven by the technical community and many proposed solutions are never integrated into community response efforts, indicating mismatches between designs and real world needs. This paper offers readers with a technical background insight into roles, goals and constraints of humanitarian crisis response. In particular, we present three seemingly conflicting views regarding how citizens can contribute to response activities as spontaneous volunteers. With examples from two field studies and grounded in literature review, we integrate the three viewpoints into a framework explaining how the roles of volunteers and trained professionals shift with increasing severity and scale of a crisis. Based on this framework, we also discuss high-level opportunities for supporting crisis response with new software tools.

Abstract: We survey several emergency management related data structures and portals designed or adopted by standard bodies such as Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), as well as standards designed or adopted by government agencies in the US and in the UK. The survey is by no means an exhaustive list of such standards and portals, but it gives a fair representation of the current state of affairs and resources to practitioners and researchers alike.

Abstract: The paper presents a four-phase action research project that was (and still is) conducted at the department of Information Management Customer Support and Operations (IM\CS&O) of a large multi-national company. The department is in charge of ICT-service continuity and has to produce ICT recovery plans that are integrated with the organization's overall Business Continuity plan. Interviews, Group Support System (GSS) technologies as well as a risk survey have been used to gather information and identify risks and threats. A systematic quantitative classification, measuring the impact of loss of ICT services on the company's business processes in terms of cost and risk will allow in the near future to utilize an economic decision model to prioritize the core activities of training and implementation of a recovery disaster plan. The research has made clear to the involved protagonists the necessity to share information, to develop awareness, and to formulate a shared recovery disaster plan to ensure ICT/business continuity and/or recovery when ICT disruptions occurs. © Proceedings ISCRAM 2004.

Abstract: Processes in disaster response management (DRM) and business processes are similar due to their general structure and goals. This encourages us to analyze the suitability of business process management tools and methods in the domain of DRM. One main challenge is the coverage of disaster specific aspects by existing process modeling languages. Since interdependencies between time, activities, and place are critical for process planning, we discuss the necessity for model extension. A special focus lies on the integration of place-related information as well as interdependencies resulting from stationary and mobile activities and resources. The integration of such place-related information is discussed as pre-condition for effective and efficient planning of disaster response processes and their successful management by disaster response workflow management systems.

Abstract: The effectiveness of emergency response largely depends on having a precise, up-to-date situational picture. With the World Wide Web having evolved from a small read-only text collection to a large-scale collection of socially created data accessible both to machines and humans alike, with the advent of social media and ubiquitous mobile applications, new sources of information are available. Currently, that potentially valuable information remains mostly unused by the command staff, mainly because the sheer amount of information cannot be handled efficiently. In this paper, we show an approach for turning massive amounts of unstructured citizen-generated content into relevant information supporting the command staff in making better informed decisions. We leverage Linked Open Data and crowdsourcing for processing data from social media, and we show how the combination of human intelligence in the crowd and automatic approaches for enhancing the situational picture with Linked Open Data will lead to a Web 3.0 approach for more efficient information handling in crisis management. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: Interorganizational coordination is crucial among human services providers responsible for responding to both personal and widespread crises. Too often, however, agencies providing disaster relief, shelter, and connection to other social service systems operate in information silos. Moreover, organizations that assist the same people may be duplicating services or ineffectively providing services to those in need. In the past, there has been no easy way for human service organizations to share information about clients, resources, and services. Over the last decade, distinct initiatives have begun to standardize data collection, storage, and transmission standards within human service domains. This paper describes several human services standards currently in use or under development in the United States and discusses how each support distinct, yet related, human service information management during disasters. The paper concludes with a call for the development of an overarching human services data interoperability standard.

Abstract: Information systems that support crisis responders and disaster risk management efforts are complex sociotechnical phenomena comprised of human capacities and relationships, data and software tools. Research in crisis informatics has highlighted the ways in which emergent groups of digital volunteers, or volunteer technical communities, have mobilized during disaster events to support information management efforts. This paper describes an action research project to support the creation of an ex ante volunteer technical community from among the potentially affected population in Kathmandu, Nepal, one of the most seismically at-risk cities in the world. In exploring this case, we argue that projects that attempt to create local open data ecosystems can be valuable but require investment in their design, execution and on-going maintenance.

Abstract: On the morning of April 15, 2013, an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) was detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, resulting in a large number of casualties. This generated a week-long response under the US National Incident Management System. In this paper, we examine online, terse messages broadcast by responding organizations and their amplification by other official entities via retransmission. Content analysis of official messages shows strong similarities with posting patterns previously observed in response to natural hazards, with the primary exception of themes related to the criminal investigation, suggesting a possible revision of guidelines for public information in light of the needs arising from extended counterterrorism operations undertaken in an urban environment. Network analysis demonstrates message posting and amplification were dominated by local actors, underscoring the importance of local readiness for management of official public information activities in the context of extremely high-profile events.

Abstract: “Participatory Sensing is an approach to data collection and interpretation in which individuals, acting alone or in groups, use their personal mobile devices and web services to systematically explore interesting aspects of their worlds ranging from health to culture.”[ http://www.mobilizingcs.org/about/participatory-sensing] Data from the physical world of sensors and the virtual world of social networks and Linked Data can be combined into interesting high-level information. Sensor data can assist in localized information retrieval by giving the search engine direct access to events happening locally in the real world. Participatory sensing enables individuals and communities to collect and share granular, accurate data about a particular area. This paper describes work in progress within the FP7 EU-funded project SMART project to develop a multimedia search engine over content and information streaming from both the physical world and the Internet. We will identify some ethical problems regarding the use and storage of such data.

Abstract: Organizations in the humanitarian relief field increasingly need to look outside their own boundaries and engage in a significant level of inter-organizational collaboration. In studying collaborative processes in the nonprofit context, researchers have used different theoretical approaches to investigate the motivations behind why organizations collaborate. Although these studies have contributed to shed some lights on these collaborative mechanisms, little is still known about the main factors that influence the decision of humanitarian organizations to engage into collaboration especially with regards to the implications of information technologies. In this paper, we explore factors for collaboration among members of the GlobalSympoNet, a network of organizations engaged in humanitarian information management. We analyze data collected through nineteen semi-structured interviews. We identified seven factors that could be grouped into three categories including structural, behavioral and organizational. Our findings also suggest that information technologies alone are not enough to motivate and maintain long lasting collaboration.

Abstract: Concepts such as trust, shared understanding, cultural differences, mental workload, and organizational structure all impact upon the effectiveness of an organization (e.g., Tindale & Kameda, 2000), and even more so in the context of large scale multinational operations (e.g, Smith, Granlund, & Lindgen, 2010). In order to study these concepts we plan a multinational, distributed experiment with participants from three nations collaborating in the same virtual environment: Canadian, British, and Swedish participants will work together as part of a multinational MTS to deal with a complex task and gain control of a crisis situation. Empirical research on MTS remains limited (see, e.g., DeChurch & Marks, 2006) particularly at the multinational level where the investigation of MTS has been so far focused on case studies and exercises (e.g., Goodwin, Essens, & Smith, 2012). Therefore, there is a need to empirically study multinational MTS in order to assess the specific issues that multinational operations face, notably cultural and languages differences. The simulation environment used as experimental platform for this project is C3Fire (www.c3fire.org, Granlund & Granlund, 2011). C3Fire creates an environment whereby teams must work together to resolve a crisis in the firefighting domain, with the goal of evacuating people in critical areas, putting out the forest fire, and protecting buildings and other areas of value from the burning forest fire. This platform makes it possible to study participants' collaborative processes when dealing with a set of crisis scenarios in the context of a simulated emergency response situation. To deal efficiently with the crisis management operation, participants need to prioritize between different objectives, identify and protect critical areas, and plan and implement activities based on given resources. All these tasks are distributed between team members, compelling participants to exchange information and coordinate within and between teams to execute the task. The task is divided into three areas of responsibility as follows: 1) Information and Planning, responsible for situation assessment and providing the operating picture; 2) Operation and Logistic, responsible for intervention and resource management; and 3) Search and Rescue, responsible for research and management of civilians. C3Fire is designed to: 1) achieve an optimal compromise between internal and external validity; 2) show flexibility in scenario configuration (spectrum of units and roles – including search and rescue functions; Tremblay et al., 2010), allowing researchers to capture emergency response and crisis management and rapid response planning; 3) be highly configurable for testing many different types of teams (e.g., hierarchical vs. horizontal organizations); and 4) readily provide objective, non-intrusive metrics for assessing teamwork effectiveness (including macrocognitive functions and team processes) as well as quantitative measures of task performance (that take into account conflicting mission goals). © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: Telephone calls are the predominant telecommunication mode in Sri Lanka. Leveraging voice-based applications for disaster communication would be acceptable and sustainable. The findings in this paper are from an experiment concerning interactive voice for connecting community-based emergency field operatives with their central coordination hub. Challenge was in interchanging the Freedom Fone (FF) Interactive Voice Response (IVR) generated, Sinhala and Tamil language, speech data with the text-based 'Sahana' disaster management system for analysis and decision support. Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) interoperable content standard was adopted for mediation. Low quality voice data resulting in incomplete information was a barrier to automating transformations between text and speech. Replacing those processes with human procedure significantly degrades the reliability. Moreover, human interaction with decoupled software systems, to accomplish the sequence of tasks, points to instabilities. This paper discusses the complexities and usability shortcomings discovered through controlled-exercises in Sri Lanka. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: We describe an interoperability challenge that arose in Haiti, identify the parameters of a general problem in crisis data management, and present a protocol called Tablecast that is designed to address the problem. Tablecast enables crisis organizations to publish, share, and update tables of data in real time. It allows rows and columns of data to be merged from multiple sources, and its incremental update mechanism is designed to support offline editing and data collection. Tablecast uses a publish/subscribe model; the format is based on Atom and employs PubSubHubbub to distribute updates to subscribers.