Deena Disraelly, & Laura Itle. (2020). Providing Reliable Assistance Faster: Secure, Modern, Mission-Capable Credentialing to Support Disaster Operations. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 1140–1143). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: The public sector, including state and local government, public health, and emergency management; the private sector; and the Federal Government jointly face challenges with rapidly collecting and validating credentials for individuals applying for employment or volunteering for emergencies, vetting security clearances, and ascertaining suitability. In 2017, for instance, credentialing gaps delayed employees and volunteers from contributing much-needed skills in disaster areas during one of the worst hurricane and wildfire seasons on record while Federal agencies inadvertently issued interim clearances to individuals with criminal records. We propose a secure, modern, mission-capable information technology solution to these with the United States Postal Service hosting this streamlined process by serving as the hub for collection, validation, and transfer of pertinent data. The solution would introduce access points in over 5,000 communities for citizens participating in disaster support operations, as well as those requiring credentialing for employment as part of day-to-day operations.
|
|
Henry Agsten. (2020). Effects of Smartphone-Based Alerting on Reducing Arrival Times for Volunteer Fire Departments. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 990–994). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: This practitioner paper describes the efforts of a volunteer fire department in Germany to reduce the time to arrive at a place of emergency. It presents the former situation, identifies reasons for delays and highlights the volunteers' first years in utilizing an existing smartphone application for alert and response as a mean to optimize their times of arrival. The paper finally evaluates the effects of the application's usage.
|
|
Rob Grace. (2020). Hyperlocal Toponym Usage in Storm-Related Social Media. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 849–859). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Crisis responders need to locate events reported in social media messages that typically lack geographic metadata such as geotags. Toponyms, places names referenced in messages, provide another source of geographic information, however, the availability and granularity of toponyms in crisis social media remain poorly understood. This study examines toponym usage and granularity across six categories of crisis-related information posted on Twitter during a severe storm. Findings show users often include geographic information in messages describing local and remote storm events but do so rarely when discussing other topics, more often use toponyms than geotags when describing local events, and tend to include fine-grained toponyms in reports of infrastructure damage and service disruption and course-grained toponyms in other kinds of storm-related messages. These findings present requirements for hyperlocal geoparsing techniques and suggest that social media monitoring presents more immediate affordances for course-grained damage assessment than fine-grained situational awareness during a crisis.
|
|
Yannic Schulte, Miriam Klein, Marcus Wiens, & Frank Fiedrich. (2020). Spontaneous Volunteers Across National Borders: An Agent-Based Comparison. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 327–336). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: In today's globalized world and with the extensive use of social media, there is a high connectivity of people across countries, which can be a helpful potential in disaster response. In a coordinated manner, spontaneous volunteers from neighbouring nations can provide high manpower and resources to a disaster affected area. In this article, we discuss why the consideration of spontaneous volunteers is relevant in a cross-border context in order to improve disaster resilience for borderlands. Furthermore, we introduce a baseline agent-based model to simulate cooperation procedures for the involvement of spontaneous volunteers to the official crisis response in a borderland and discuss important issues that need to be addressed in future considerations.
|
|
Hans Julius Betke. (2018). A Volunteer Coordination System Approach for Crisis Committees. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 786–795). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: In disaster situations security authorities and organizations have the responsibility and duty to manage the disaster response. These organizations work in elaborated command and control structures with well trained employees. But in recent events, supported by new technologies like social media and mobile devices, spontaneous volunteers from the local population gained new importance as helpful force in disaster response. The high amount of volunteers bears high potentials to improve the efficiency of several activities through pure manpower. However, these people are not integrated in existing structures and lack a proper qualification. The proper coordination of spontaneous volunteers poses new challenges for disaster authorities. In this paper we introduce the prototype of a novel information system enabling crisis committees to coordinate spontaneous volunteers by semi-automated purposive communication and allocation. The results of first staff exercises are discussed to emphasize potential benefits and open challenges.
|
|