Aslak Wegner Eide, Ida Maria Haugstveit, Ragnhild Halvorsrud, & María Borén. (2013). Inter-organizational collaboration structures during emergency response: A case study. In J. Geldermann and T. Müller S. Fortier F. F. T. Comes (Ed.), ISCRAM 2013 Conference Proceedings – 10th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 94–104). KIT; Baden-Baden: Karlsruher Institut fur Technologie.
Abstract: This paper examines the problem of achieving efficient inter-organizational collaboration during emergency response. The authors interviewed 11 representatives from Norwegian emergency agencies and supporting organizations about a hypothetical scenario involving a large-scale chemical incident. The interviews resulted in the identification and categorization of more than 45 actors that would be involved in the response effort, clarification of the individual capabilities and knowledge those actors would possess, and descriptions of how they would interact and communicate with each other. The results illustrate the complexity and necessity of achieving inter-organizational collaboration by showing how capabilities and knowledge are distributed and communicated across different actors, and suggest that such communications are mainly verbal. Based on this, the paper discusses challenges and opportunities for improving inter-organizational collaboration in the future.
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Benedikt Ley, Volkmar Pipek, Tim Siebigteroth, & Torben Wiedenhöefer. (2013). Retrieving and exchanging of information in inter- Organizational crisis management. In J. Geldermann and T. Müller S. Fortier F. F. T. Comes (Ed.), ISCRAM 2013 Conference Proceedings – 10th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 812–822). KIT; Baden-Baden: Karlsruher Institut fur Technologie.
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.
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Ly Dinh, Sumeet Kulkarni, Pingjing Yang, & Jana Diesner. (2023). Reliability of Methods for Extracting Collaboration Networks from Crisis-related Situational Reports and Tweets. In V. L. Thomas J. Huggins (Ed.), Proceedings of the ISCRAM Asia Pacific Conference 2022 (pp. 181–195). Palmerston North, New Zealand: Massey Unversity.
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.
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Louis-Marie Ngamassi Tchouakeu, Carleen Maitland, Andrea H. Tapia, & Kartikeya Bajpai. (2011). Humanitarian organizational collaboration: Information technologies as necessary but not sufficient. In E. Portela L. S. M.A. Santos (Ed.), 8th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management: From Early-Warning Systems to Preparedness and Training, ISCRAM 2011. Lisbon: Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM.
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.
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Annemijn F. Van Gorp. (2014). Integration of volunteer and technical communities into the humanitarian aid sector: Barriers to collaboration. In and P.C. Shih. L. Plotnick M. S. P. S.R. Hiltz (Ed.), ISCRAM 2014 Conference Proceedings – 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 622–631). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University.
Abstract: Volunteer and Technical Communities (V&TCs) with expertise in the collection, analysis and presentation of data and the development of supporting technologies, have potential to inform humanitarian aid organizations and help increase the efficiency of their operations. This study analyzes the role of V&TCs during recent response efforts and identifies a number of challenges of organizational nature that need to be overcome in order for aid organizations to harness the potential of V&TCs. The study finds that V&TCs can broadly be categorized into software platform development communities, mapping collaborations, expert networks and data aggregators. Evidence of collaboration with aid organizations however remains limited, suggesting a number of barriers need to be overcome, including (1) limited resources; (2) the management of volunteers; (3) different levels of engagement; (4) level of commitment by V&TCs; (5) different ways of working; and (6) aid organizations' limited knowledge about V&TCs' expertise.
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