Guest Editorial Preface: Special Issue on IT-Support for Crisis and Continuity Management

On 21 January 2013, there was a fire at the central office of a telecommunications network operator in Siegen, which resulted in more than 500,000 telephone connections being collapsed for several hours and occasionally several days. Emergency calls were also not possible. The websites of the district and the control center were offline. The local radio which typically acts as a central point of information in such situations was out of service. But not only the civic-societal continuity, also the operational continuity was affected (Reuter et al., 2017). In this example, both continuity and crisis management are essential to recover to regular business resp. life

Informelle E-Partizipation in Parteien

Politische Partizipation im Internet hat zunehmenden Einfluss auf reale politische Willensbildungsprozesse. Parteien, die ein Kernelement des politischen Systems in Deutschland bilden, stehen vor einer wichtigen Gestaltungsaufgabe, wenn sie den Strukturwandel der politischen Kommunikation erfolgreich bewältigen möchten. Ziel unseres Beitrags ist es, Erkenntnisse für diese Gestaltungsaufgabe zu liefern. Dafür wurden 91 Vorschläge von CDU-Mitgliedern ausgewertet und ergänzende Interviews geführt, um Praktiken der (E-)Partizipation sowie ihre Defizite und Bedingungen zu identifizieren. Aus den Ergebnissen leiten wir die Notwendigkeit von insbesondere informellen E-Partizipations-und Vernetzungs-Technologien für den Einsatz in der CDU, potentiell aber auch anderen Parteien, ab

Introduction to this Special Issue on “Human-Machine Interaction and Cooperation in Safety-Critical Systems”

Mission- and safety-critical domains are more and more characterized by interactive and multimedia systems varying from large-scale technologies (e. g. airplanes) to wearable devices (e. g. smartglasses) operated by professional staff or volunteering laypeople. While technical availability, reliability and security of computer-based systems are of utmost importance, outcomes and performances increasingly depend on sufficient human-machine interaction or even cooperation to a large extent. While this i-com Special Issue on “Human-Machine Interaction and Cooperation in Safety-Critical Systems” presents recent research results from specific application domains like aviation, automotive, crisis management and healthcare, this introductory paper outlines the diversity of users, technologies and interaction or cooperation models involved

Semi-Automatic Alerts and Notifications for Emergency Services based on Cross-Platform Social Media Data - Evaluation of a Prototype

The convergence of social networking and mobile media technology is shifting the way how people communicate and gain or share information. People are using social media to a greater extent, also in emergency situations. During disasters throughout the world, such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2013 European floods, or the terror attacks 2015 in Paris and 2016 in Brussels, this has been illustrated again. Often information about disasters even finds its way faster to social media than it reaches regular news companies and emergency services. However, approaches for processing and analyzing the vast quantities of data produced have even more potential. Yet many emergency services still have not found a way to put this potential to an effective use. Within our project EmerGent we are developing a system to process and analyse information from social media particularly tailored for the specific needs of emergency services. The aim is to transform the high volume of noisy data into a low volume of rich content that is useful to emergency personnel. In the first part of this paper we present our approach from a user interface perspective. The second part deals with the evaluation of the approach and the derivation of future potentials of the approach

Redesigning hazard communication through technology: collaboration, co-production and coherence

Digital and virtual communication impacts increasingly upon the management of natural hazards in an uncertain world, challenging the boundaries between science and society. This study uses sociological theory to explore how technology reduces the mitigation failures and conflicts that scholars often disproportionately prioritise; it also evaluates the evolution of nodal points between communicating stakeholders in a complex hazard management network. Technical innovation has reshaped Iceland’s approach to mitigating risks associated with volcanic events; interconnections between stakeholders within the network evolve through technical innovation and the forming of collaborative engagements that renegotiate the roles and responsibilities of monitoring and response agencies. Interviews and participant observations, with agencies including the Icelandic Meteorological Office, evidence the impact of network evolution upon social media use, inter-agency trust, the expansion of crowdsourcing, and increasingly distributed decision-making frameworks.La communication numérique et virtuelle impacte de plus en plus la gestion des risques naturels dans un monde instable, défiant les frontières entre science et société. Notre étude étudie, sous l'angle de la sociologie, comment la technologie contribue à réduire les défaillances et les divergences en la matière, auxquels se réfèrent trop souvent les scientifiques. Nous analysons également l'évolution des points nodaux entre les acteurs de la communication à l'intérieur d'un réseau complexe de gestion des risques. En Islande les progrès technologiques ont remodelé l'approche de l'atténuation des risques associés aux événements volcaniques. Les interconnexions entre acteurs du réseau évoluent en fonction des innovations techniques et du développement d'engagements de collaboration qui renégocient les rôles et les responsabilités des organismes de contrôle et d'intervention. Les interviews et les observations des différents organismes, y compris l'Office météorologique d'Islande, démontrent l'impact de l'évolution du réseau sur l'utilisation des médias sociaux, la collaboration entre organismes, l'extension du "crowdsourcing", et la répartition croissante des cadres décisionnels

Towards Efficient Security: Business Continuity Management in Small and Medium Enterprises

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is an integral part of civil security in terms of corporate crisis management. According to the ISO 22301 (2014) BCM is defined as a holistic management process which identifies potential threats to an organization and the impacts those threats might have on business operations. Looking at the current situation of studies conducted in this field it seems to be obvious that the use of BCM in Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) is underrepresented and that the security level is partially located in an uneconomical range. This paper presents a literature research on the use of BCM in SME and discusses research findings concerning this matter. Based on this a matrix for possible impacts vs. quality of the crisis management for different actors is derived. The article concludes with the presentation of lightweight und easy to handle BCM security solutions in form of Smart Services, as a possible solution for the increasingly IT relaying industry 4.0

Ready, set, crisis – transitioning to crisis mode in local public administration

Local public administrations are typically the first responders during disruptive crisis events. Building on literature on fast-response organizations, this study theorizes on their ability to transition effectively from routine bureaucracy to crisis mode. Empirically, we study early responses to COVID-19 in Germany with agency-level survey data. The findings suggest that an effective switch between practices cannot be explained by crisis severity alone. Instead, organizational, technical, and individual preparedness of local administrations matter. These results provide insights into the conditions that enable administrations to respond effectively to crisis events, offering a comprehensive understanding of crisis management capabilities at the local level

Microblogging during the European Floods 2013: What Twitter May Contribute in German Emergencies

Social media is becoming more and more important in crisis management. However its analysis by emergency services still bears unaddressed challenges and the majority of studies focus on the use of social media in the USA. In this paper German tweets of the European Flood 2013 are therefore captured and analyzed using descriptive statistics, qualitative data coding, and computational algorithms. Our work illustrates that this event provided sufficient German traffic and geo-locations as well as enough original data (not derivative). However, up-to-date Named Entity Recognizer (NER) with German classifier could not recognize German rivers and highways satisfactorily. Furthermore our analysis revealed pragmatic (linguistic) barriers resulting from irony, wordplay, and ambiguity, as well as in retweet-behavior. To ease the analysis of data we suggest a retweet ratio, which is illustrated to be higher with important tweets and may help selecting tweets for mining. We argue that existing software has to be adapted and improved for German language characteristics, also to detect markedness, seriousness and trut

Hvordan foregår koordinering mellom nødetater under en pågående krise?

Koordinering mellom nødetater er noe som har vært på agenda i en årrekke. Allerede i 1953 presiserte Redningsutvalget at koordineringen mellom nødetatene ikke var tilfredsstillende, og behovet for et samvirkeprinsipp begynte å melde seg. De siste to tiår er det flere store hendelser, der evalueringene peker på at koordineringen mellom nødetater ikke er tilfredsstillende. Den overordnete problemstillingen i denne oppgaven er: Hvordan kan interorganisatorisk koordinering mellom nødetatene forbedres? Mer spesifikt undersøker denne oppgaven hvordan koordinering fungerer i formelle og uformelle former mellom nødetatene, og hvordan disse mekanismene påvirker hverandre. Videre ser oppgaven på hvilke faktorer som kan påvirke koordineringen mellom nødetatene, og hvordan faktorene påvirker koordineringen. Oppgaven ser så på hvordan nødetatenes koordinering blir påvirket av krisens omfang. Denne oppgaven har benyttet en kvalitativ forskningsstrategi. Dette er gjennomført som en casestudie, hvor casen har vært interorganisatorisk koordinering mellom nødetater under pågående kriser. Denne oppgaven benytter primærdata fra 12 respondenter, gjennomført som intervjuer. Videre er det benyttet sekundærdata i form av offentlige utredninger og evalueringsrapporter. Denne oppgaven har funnet ut at ulik organisering på tvers av nødetatene påvirker koordineringen negativt. Dette kan forbedres med en mer uniform organisering av etatene. En mer enhetlig organisering vil kunne bidra til at faktorer som merking av innsatsmannskaper, organisering av skadested og utnyttelse av kunnskap blir forbedret. Videre vil relasjoner og kjennskap på tvers av nødetatene bidra til bedre koordinering. For å forbedre relasjoner vil formelle og uformelle møteplasser være effektivt, som f.eks. Operativt Leder Forum. Oppgaven viser også at teknologiske hjelpemidler har en positiv effekt på koordineringen, ved at man skaffer seg et bedre informasjonsgrunnlag. Det argumenteres for at teknologiske hjelpemidler vil kunne bidra til at tidspresset under informasjonsinnhenting blir redusert, dersom teknologien tilpasses beslutningstakere i kriser. På denne måten kan teknologi bidra til at ledere fatter analytisk beslutninger fremfor intuitivt, uavhengig av krisens omfang

Emergent Collaboration Infrastructures: Technology Design for Inter-Organizational Crisis Management (Ph.D. Thesis)

Using the domain of crisis management, Christian Reuter explores challenges and opportunities for technology design in emergent environments. He therefore empirically analyzes collaborative work in inter-organizational crisis - such as the police, fire departments, energy network operators and citizens - in order to identify collaboration practices that reveal work infrastructure limitations. He also designs, implements and evaluates novel concepts and ICT artifacts towards the support of emergent collaboration. Besides the discovery of potential organizational effects on the ability to deal with emergence he presents methodological implications for technology design