Abstract: Information sharing is crucial in responding to and managing crises. A great variety of organizations respond to crises, ranging from international organizations, through non-governmental organizations, commercial suppliers, government ministries, and the media, to individual volunteers. At best, they collaborate to combine their respective strengths in creating synergy. At worst, they deconflict their operations so that the one does not get in the way of the other. In either case, the organizations must communicate with one another. Previous research has shown that this communication takes the form of an information market. This paper considers the possible mechanisms for information markets in humanitarian and military coalitions. While there has been work on market mechanisms in the economics literature, this needs to be adapted for the exchange of information and information services instead of physical goods and services. This paper proposes a taxonomy of market mechanisms that is tailored to information sharing within coalitions. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: The “walking wounded” is a category of disaster victims that can help themselves in finding their way to safety. The problem we address here is how first responders, walking wounded, and other rescue personnel can coordinate their joint activities more efficiently in order to accomplish the evacuation as quickly as possible. We focus our design on the “coordination loops” in the disaster response organization, both vertically across levels of authority, and horizontally among responders in the same echelon. In our envisioned scenario of a chemical accident we identify the most important interactions through which activities are coordinated that are crucial for a successful evacuation. We propose three different “coordination devices” that can be used by the walking wounded, the rescuers in the fields, and the people in the command center. We believe our approach, explicitly designing support systems for coordination first, will lead to important improvements in the daily practice of disaster response.

Abstract: Disaster management exercises are a core component of humanitarian organizations’ preparedness strategies. They entail diverse purposes, from training capabilities of participants to testing response plans to enhancing collaboration between organizations and many more. However, it is uncertain how much exercises contribute to preparedness. Rigorous evaluation is needed to exploit learning opportunities of an exercise. Therefore, exercises must target evaluable objectives, which is complicated by the socio-technical openness of the exercise system, the heterogeneity of organizational needs, and the scarcity of resources. Many different tools aim to support evaluation but are limited to specific use cases, resulting in a fragmented overview for practitioners. Due to the excessive effort involved, practitioners often consider exercise evaluation to be of secondary importance. This study thus proposes the conceptual design of a combined toolkit that supports the practitioners in a more rigorous but resource-efficient evaluation to make disaster management exercises more evaluation-driven.

Abstract: This paper explores the difficulties of collaboration between Volunteer and Technical Communities (V&TCs) and Humanitarian Response Organisations (HROs). The phenomenon of digital volunteers and their role in collecting and analyzing social media data provided by disaster affected populations has brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges to the humanitarian system. Central to these processes are the risks and vulnerabilities that these transformations might bring to existing humanitarian actors. Thus, this paper draws upon the work of Anthony Giddens regarding trust to account for the ongoing relational dynamics, and the unpacking of both it's institutional and inter-personal dimensions. The paper identifies two major approaches underlying their collaborative efforts. The first approach concerns a top-down and centralized process of developing a institutionalized forms of interfacing; while the second concerns the development of interpersonal relational infrastructure.

Abstract: Disaster management is increasingly becoming a project in managing diversity, from cross-organisational collaboration to inclusivity of voices. This is particularly prevalent when dealing with transboundary risks. New information technologies support these transboundary interactions by compiling diverse information and sources to build collaborative insight beyond what any individual organisation can know. This paper explores the ethical concerns that planners and responders face as they work with these collaborative information technologies to engage with data from other organisations, based in different data frameworks, socio-political priorities, goals, and cultures of risk. It draws on the ethical impact assessment of a cross-border collaborative crisis planning platform currently under development in the H2020 project IN-PREP to examine ethical tensions around equity, inclusion, diversity, solidarity, accountability and transparency. It discusses the consequences of such design foci for an agency?s ability to notice ethical risks that emerge from working in diversity.

Abstract: Collaborative teamwork is becoming more common in several domains including healthcare and disaster management. While collaborative teamwork can benefit from information system (IS) support, designing IS models to support collaboration is a significant challenge owing to the variations in tasks and people that must be supported, and the different contexts within which collaboration takes place. Collaborative teamwork can vary greatly because of context, which is the integration of diverse, dynamic, and heterogeneous needs for groups to achieve a specific goal. However in the literature there has been limited emphasis on how contextual underpinnings can be incorporated into IS design. This paper uses a case study of the design of a user-driven prototype disaster management IS. We used the think aloud method to capture participant thoughts while interacting with the IS prototype. The think aloud data was analyzed and used to develop an ontology of contextual considerations to support IS design.

Abstract: We describe a socio-technical system designed to train different organisations in emergency management during the preparedness phase. In this system, both humans and the system work together in building organisational context awareness. The system uses a normative multi-agent system and a tangible table for user interaction. Real time virtual feedbacks are used to draw users? attention to the validity of their actions with respect to the emergency plan. Feedback allows the actors to be aware of the other factors that impact the validity of their action (actions of other actors, environment etc.) and to identify the behaviour that is expected of them by the other organisations. The system is still in its prototype phase. Its behaviour is illustrated by example scenarios, showing that it is possible to support collaboration amongst distant actors, in a way that only relevant information is shown.

Abstract: Information is the most valuable resource for coping and recovery work in crisis management. It is the foundation for coordination, collaboration and decision-making. However, several challenges face information retrieval, evaluation and exchange processes in inter-organizational crisis management. On the one hand, due to the dynamic nature of crisis situations, information demands are hardly predictable and change in the course of time. Moreover, inter-organizational issues like terminology issues, policy constrains or even the lack of awareness about information available are influencing factors and need to be considered in designing appropriate ICT. In this paper we report from an empirical study, where we had a closer look on information retrieval and exchange practices in scenarios of medium to large power outages in Germany on an interorganizational level. Derived from these results, we were able to present a reference implementation of an interorganizational information repository (IOIR) and report our findings from a related evaluation.

Abstract: The lack of human-robot collaboration currently presents a bottleneck to widespread use of robots in urban search & rescue (USAR) missions. The paper argues that an important aspect of realizing human-robot collaboration is collaborative control, and the recognition and expression of affect. Affective collaborative robots can enhance joint human-robot performance by adapting the robot's (social) role and interaction to the user's affective state and the context. Current USAR robots lack these capabilities. This paper presents theory, application domains, and requirements for affective collaborative robots based on the current state of the art. With methods from cognitive architectures, affective computing, and human-robot interaction, three core functions of affective collaborative robots can be realized: sliding autonomy, affective communication, and adaptive attitude. These robot functions can substantially enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of rescue workers and meanwhile reduce their cognitive workload. Furthermore, robots with such functions can approach civilians in the field appropriately.

Abstract: Assessing the effectiveness of crisis response is key to improving preparedness and adapting policies. One method for response evaluation is reviewing actual response activities and interactions. Response reports are often available in the form of natural language text data. Analyzing a large number of such reports requires automated or semi automated solutions. To improve the trustworthiness of methods for this purpose, we empirically validate the reliability of three relation extraction methods that we used to construct interorganizational collaboration networks by comparing them against human-annotated ground truth (crisis-specific situational reports and tweets). For entity extraction, we find that using a combination of two off-the-shelf methods (FlairNLP and SpaCy) is optimal for situational reports data and one method (SpaCy) for tweets data. For relation extraction, we find that a heuristics-based model that we built by leveraging word co-occurrence and deep and shallow syntax as features and training it on domain-specific text data outperforms two state-of-the-art relation extraction models (Stanford OpenIE and OneIE) that were pre-trained on general domain data. We also find that situational reports, on average, contain less entities and relations than tweets, but the extracted networks are more closely related to collaboration activities mentioned in the ground truth. As it is widely known that general domain tools might need adjustment to perform accurately in specific domains, we did not expect the tested off-the-shelf tools to perform highly accurately. Our point is to rather identify what accuracy one could reasonably expect when leveraging available resources as-is for domain specific work (in this case, crisis informatics), what errors (in terms of false positives and false negatives) to expect, and how to account for that.

Abstract: Increasing market volatility and disruptions imply risks for companies and governments and have become therefore focus topics. Adequate tools to identify, assess and manage future developments are key to survive in a turbulent environment. In our paper, we present the systematic development process of an innovative, web-based foresight platform, which is a joint research project funded by the German Federal Government and aims to improve the robustness in decision making by collaborative foresight. Its four interlinked applications have the purpose to enable their users a collaborative generation, discussion, evaluation and development of future-oriented knowledge. Thereby, a special emphasis is on the relevance and the timeliness of the provided information. Within the multi-stage requirement analysis of the tool platform we analyzed existing concepts in order to identify strengths and weaknesses and conducted brainstorming sessions and interviews with professionals of 130 companies and organizations to account for different backgrounds, perspectives and intentions. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: Optimal communication and information exchange are key elements for handling complex crises or disaster situations. With the increasing number of heterogeneous ICT systems, also raises the importance of adequate support for interconnectivity and information logistics between stakeholders to thoroughly gather information and to make quick but precise decisions. The main purpose of the information exchange is then to manage the crisis as quickly as possible, to provide full information to protect first responders' health and safety, to optimally dispatch resources, and to ensure coordination between different relief forces. Based on an end user survey with a particular focus on first responders, this paper introduces an evolutionary architecture to enable information exchange in crises situation or disasters. The aim is to provide a decentralized approach among heterogeneous ICT-systems which abstracts from the underlying communication technologies and heterogeneity of connected systems and fulfills the functional and non-functional requirements from end users.

Abstract: Disaster recovery in urban environments is a complex process. Because of high population densities and the presence of many societal and infrastructural dependencies, urban areas are prone to severe loss of self-reliance in case of a disaster. Rebuilding such areas to a self-sustaining state is a daunting task, and requires a high degree of community effort and comprehensive knowledge about the affected environment. All too often, these requirements are not properly met, leading to a long recovery trajectory and misalignments between recovery efforts and community needs. We suggest that most issues in disaster recovery stem from 'collaboration gaps': Flawed organisational structures between stakeholder parties that exist between levels of operation and between phases in the recovery process. We introduce two innovation pathways to close these gaps, and present the COBACORE project that will explore these pathways, and create a collaborative platform for effective community-based comprehensive disaster recovery.