Abstract: Understanding that disasters and conflicts do not occur in a vacuum, but are integrally linked to the broader context in which they take place, building resilience within both state and society structures becomes a crucial tool to speed recovery and lessen the likelihood of recurrence as local and institutional capacities are put in place to respond to, manage and reduce emerging risks. Since, 2008, United Nations Development Programme in Sudan has through its Crisis and Recovery Mapping and Analysis Project been developing a participatory mapping and analysis methodology to enhance crisis responsiveness and evidence-based strategic planning both within the United Nations system and national government. Using innovative technologies and GIS, sensitive issues are contextualized and depoliticized through novel correlations and visualisations, allowing previously contesting state and society actors to jointly identify priorities for intervention and response. The process has fostered an open dialogue, strengthening the capacities of local actors to respond to emerging crises in a timely and appropriate manner. Participatory mapping has thus become a key tool in managing complexities in peacebuilding and recovery in post-crisis settings. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: In 2014 a small fire started in a forest in central Sweden. Within a few days it developed into the largest wildfire in Sweden in the last 50 years. As the scale of the fire increased, so did the need for direction and coordination of the resources engaged in the response operation. Both official investigators and the research community have studied the challenges and come up with recommendations for improvements of the Swedish crisis management system. All authors of this paper have been involved in such efforts. This paper is a result of us trying to formulate lessons learnt based on several written reports and official discussions. The development of the narratives constructed by individuals involved in the response, investigators and researchers is analyzed. We conclude that researchers need to pay attention to their own role in this development. Maybe there is a need for a game changer on the methodological side?

Abstract: One of the challenges of humanitarian organizations is that there exist limited decision technologies that fit their needs. It has also been pointed out that those organizations experience coordination difficulties with volunteers willing to help. The purpose of this paper is to help address those challenges through the development of a decision model to assist in the management of volunteers. While employee workforce management models have been the topic of extensive research over the past decades, no work has focused on the problem of managing humanitarian relief volunteers. In this paper, we discuss a series of principles from the field of volunteer management and develop a multi criteria optimization model to assist in the assignment of volunteers to tasks. We present an illustrative example and analyze a solution methodology where the decision maker exercises his/her preferences by trading-off conflicting objectives. Conclusions, limitations, and directions for future research are also discussed.

Abstract: Conducting empirical research involves a balancing act between scientific rigor and real-life pragmatics. DECIS Lab researches systems-of-systems, consisting of humans and artificial systems involved in collaborative decision making under chaotic circumstances. An important objective is the usefulness of our results to our major application domain: crisis management. DECIS Lab was involved to set up a crisis management exercise experiment and according measurements regarding an improvement in internal communication at Gemeente (Municipality) Borsele. In this paper the empirical research regarding this experiment, the methodology and its results are briefly outlined. Our main lessons learned concern the interrelationship between scenario, experiment and measurements; the problem of acquiring usable data; and the challenges of conducting grounded research.

Abstract: For sustainable care of cultural heritage it is essential to set accurate goals. However, the difficulty involved in establishing what is accurate in any given circumstance is often highly underestimated. Unbalanced decision making based on partial consideration of the situation surrounding a cultural heritage asset can at best result in inefficient use of resources and at worst will lead to its rapid loss. But the balance of risk against benefit is not straightforward, the impact of certain activities are far easier to quantify than others. Consequently, the adoption of a well balanced approach that considers all activities equally within the same framework is the key to providing appropriate and sustainable levels of protection. The development of an appropriate and systematic methodology offers a resolution to this problem. The outcome will be a suite of performance indicators assigned to each activity within a multivariate management framework. This paper describes the development and validation of such a methodology and the current status of the author's research.

Abstract: Several studies on Twitter usage during disasters analyze tweets collected using ad-hoc keywords pre-defined by researchers. While recent efforts have worked to improve this methodology, open questions remain about which keywords can be used to uncover tweets contributing to situational awareness (SA) and the quality of tweets returned using different terms. Herein we consider a novel methodology for uncovering relevant keywords one can use to search for tweets containing situational awareness. We provide a description of the methodology and initial results which suggest our approach may lead to better keywords to use for keyword searching during disasters.

Abstract: The interaction design for web emergency management information systems (WEMIS) is an important aspect to keep in mind due to the criticality of the domain: decision making, updating available resources, defining a task list, trusting in proposed information. A common interaction design strategy for WEMIS seems to be needed but currently there are few references in literature. Our aim is to contribute to this lack with a set of interactive principles for WEMIS. From the emergency point of view, existing WEMIS have been analyzed to extract common features and to design interaction principles for emergency. Furthermore, we studied design principles extracted from the Turoff's model relating them to emergency phases and features. In particular, in this paper, we choose to follow the current trend in the definition of emergency life cycles. In our approach, referring to general policies in literature, the emergency management process is divided into two different sub cycles: back-end and front-end. From the interaction point of view, a formalization process based on the interactive PIE model has been defined. The result we propose here is a set of design principles for supporting interactive properties for WEMIS.

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.