Improving Emergency Plans through Public Engagement

Emergency plans are fundamental for the speedy and effective response in disaster situations. Plans are often constructed by teams of experts, who apply their knowledge to define response procedures, but lack part of location-specific knowledge that can be very relevant to make decisions during responses. Such knowledge is, however, in the minds of people who use those spaces every day, but are not involved in the planning processes. In this paper, we advocate for citizens' involvement in emergency plan elaboration via Public Participation, a mechanism long time used in other areas of e-government. We define a process for the elicitation of citizen's knowledge via public participation, and present the results of a study on its potential impact, where individuals used different collaborative tools to volunteer knowledge to be used in emergency plan improvement.Penadés Gramage, MC.; Vivacqua, AS.; Borges, M.; Canos Cerda, JH. (2011). Improving Emergency Plans through Public Engagement. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1133

From planning to resilience: The role (and value) of the emergency plan

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Technological Forecasting & Social Change. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Technological Forecasting & Social Change 121 (2017) 17–30. DOI 10.1016/j.techfore.2016.12.004.The study of resilience in the emergency management field is nowadays in effervescence. Traditionally, the robustness of organizations against disasters is based on several pillars: equipment, staff training, organization and, especially, planning. All of these dimensions are aimed at increasing the preparedness and recovery of organizations against disasters. While the approaches to resilience in emergency management focus on the processes that implement these dimensions, we approach resilience-building processes from a different perspective: instead of focusing on planning-related activities, we pay attention to the principal outcome of such activities, namely emergency plan. We show how the management of the emergency plan can contribute to reinforcing an organization's resilience. First, we identify the major resilience-related emergency plan components and suggest improved emergency plans that consider the characteristics that contribute to resilience. Secondly, we show how to reinforce the resilience of the organizations that have emergency plans. Our study is based on QuEP, a quality-based framework for the assessment and improvement of emergency plan management within organizations. We have extended and integrated the resilience characteristics as practices of the QuEP's maturity level hierarchy to make up QuEP + R. We describe its resilience model and give details of a supporting tool, currently under development. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.The work of M. C. Penades and J. H. Canos& was partially funded by MINECO under grant CALPE (TIN2015-68608-R) and A.G. NCifiez received support from SENESCYT scholarship program of the Republic of Ecuador.Penadés Gramage, MC.; Núñez Ávila, AG.; Canos Cerda, JH. (2016). From planning to resilience: The role (and value) of the emergency plan. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 121(3):17-30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.12.004S1730121

Librería de activos para la gestión del conocimiento sobre procesos software: PAL-Wiki

La mejora de procesos de software describe las acciones a tomar para cambiar el proceso en la organización y así cumplir las necesidades de negocio y lograr sus objetivos de negocio más efectivamente. Para lograr la implementación de estrategias de mejora del proceso se debe crear una infraestructura con soporte a la definición, despliegue y realimentación del proceso y otras actividades relacionadas con el proceso Una de tales infraestructuras de soporte son las librerías de activos de proceso (Process Asset Library - PAL). Las PAL son repositorios de documentos con información útil para el personal que está definiendo, implementando, gestionando y ejecutando procesos en las organizaciones. Las PAL también contribuyen al aprendizaje de procesos por medio de la consulta de activos que incluyan ejemplos y material de formación para entender y aplicar los procesos definidos. Sin embargo, actualmente las PAL presentan algunos problemas: almacenan conocimiento formal pero sólo en algunas está estructurado y estandarizado según algún modelo de referencia; el conocimiento informal y tácito no está incluido; la medición y preservación de los activos es un proceso difícil de implementar; se requiere la definición de los activos de forma colaborativa, estrategias adecuadas de búsqueda de activos; y el almacenamiento de activos aplicados durante el desarrollo de proyectos específicos. Para solucionar estos problemas, esta tesis doctoral plantea la incorporación de técnicas de gestión del conocimiento basadas en tecnologías Web 2.0. Específicamente, se ha utilizado una wiki como mecanismo para desarrollar la solución propuesta denominada PAL-Wiki. La PAL-Wiki se caracteriza por implementar un conjunto de procesos de gestión del conocimiento que apoya el aprendizaje y uso de procesos de software. Las funciones de gestión del conocimiento incluyen: adquisición, organización, distribución, utilización, preservación y medición del conocimiento sobre el proceso de software. La PAL-Wiki ha sido validada por medio de su aplicación en procesos de desarrollo ágiles.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Software Process Improvement describes the actions to be taken to change the process in the organization and thus meeting the business needs and achieve their business objectives more effectively. To achieve the implementation of process improvement strategies should create an infrastructure to support the definition, deployment and feedback of the process and other activities related to the process. One such support infrastructure is the Process Asset Library - PAL. PALs are repositories of documents with useful information for staff that are defining, implementing, managing and executing processes in the organizations. The PAL also contributes to the learning process through the query of assets, including examples and training materials to understand and implement the defined processes. However, currently the PALs present some problems: formal knowledge stored but only some are structured and standardized according to a reference model, the informal and tacit knowledge is not included, and measuring and preservation of assets is a difficult process to implement; requires the definition of assets in a collaborative manner, appropriate strategies for searching assets and storage assets used during the development of specific projects. To solve these problems, this thesis proposes the incorporation of Knowledge Management techniques based on Web 2.0 technologies. Specifically, a wiki is used as a mechanism to develop the proposed solution called PAL-Wiki. The PAL-Wiki is characterized by implementing a set of knowledge management processes that support the learning and use of software processes. The knowledge management functions include: acquisition, organization, distribution, use, preservation and measurement of knowledge about the software process. The PAL-Wiki has been validated through its application in agile development processes

A semantic wiki based on spatial hypertext

Spatial Hypertext Wiki (ShyWiki) is a wiki which represents knowledge using notes that are spatially distributed in wiki pages and have visual characteristics such as colour, size, or font type. The use of spatial and visual characteristics in wikis is important to improve human comprehension, creation and organization of knowledge. Another important capability in wikis is to allow machines to process knowledge. Wikis that formally structure knowledge for this purpose are called semantic wikis. This paper describes how ShyWiki can make use of spatial hypertext in order to be a semantic wiki. ShyWiki can represent knowledge at different levels of formality. Users of ShyWiki can annotate the content and represent semantic relations without being experts of semantic web data description languages. The spatial hypertext features make it suitable for users to represent unstructured knowledge and implicit graphic relations among concepts. In addition, semantic web and spatial hypertext features are combined to represent structured knowledge. The semantic web features of ShyWiki improve navigation and publish the wiki knowledge as RDF resources, including the implicit relations that are analyzed using a spatial parser

A semantic spatial hypertext wiki

Spatial Hypertext Wiki (ShyWiki) is a wiki which represents knowledge using notes that are spatially distributed in wiki pages and have some visual characteristics such as colour, size, or font type. Spatial and visual characteristics are important in a wiki to improve human comprehension, creation and organization of knowledge. Another important capability in wikis is to allow machines to process knowledge. Wikis that formally structure knowledge for this purpose are called semantic wikis. This paper describes the semantic wiki capabilities of ShyWiki. ShyWiki can represent knowledge at different levels of formality. Users of ShyWiki can annotate the content and represent semantic relations without being experts of semantic web data description languages. The spatial hypertext features make it suitable for users to represent unstructured knowledge and implicit graphic relations among concepts. In addition, semantic web and spatial hypertext features are combined to represent structured knowledge. The semantic web features of ShyWiki improve navigation and publish the wiki knowledge as RDF resources, including the implicit relations that are analyzed using a spatial parser

An experience using a Spatial Hypertext Wiki

Most wikis do not allow users to collaboratively organize relations among wiki pages, nor ways to visualize them because such relations are hard to express using hyperlinks. The Spatial Hypertext Wiki (ShyWiki) is a wiki that uses Spatial Hypertext to represent visual and spatial implicit relations. This paper reports an experience about the use of ShyWiki features and its spatial hypertext model. Fourgroups, consisting of 3 members each, were asked to use ShyWiki for creating, sharing and brainstorming knowledge during the design and documentation of a software architecture. We present the evaluation of a questionnaire that users answered about their perceived usefulness and easiness of use of the spatial and visual properties of ShyWiki, and several of its features. We have also asked the users if they would and the visual and spatial properties useful in a wiki such as Wikipedia. In addition, we have analyzed the visual and spatial structures used in the wiki pages, and which features have been used