DATA SHARING FOR TASK EFFICIENCY DURING A FOREIGN HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE/DISASTER RELIEF EFFORT

This paper adapts Zigurs & Buckland’s (1998) Task Technology Fit theoretical framework for application to a virtual organization that exists for episodically during foreign humanitarian assistance/disaster relief efforts. Using the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and more than 1000 lessons learned cases from the federal government, I examine how task activities, process support level, military command level and partner types influence the technology platform that is used for structured and unstructured data sharing in real time. The predicted fit between task and technology is supported; however, addition of consideration of the virtual nature of the internal and external partnerships that are required for foreign disaster relief efforts improves the explanatory model. Recommendations for theory changes and the practical implications of this research for future foreign disaster relief efforts are explored

An investigation into the role of crowdsourcing in generating information for flood risk management

Flooding is a major global hazard whose management relies on an accurate understanding of its risks. Crowdsourcing represents a major opportunity for supporting flood risk management as members of the public are highly capable of producing useful flood information. This thesis explores a wide range of issues related to flood crowdsourcing using an interdisciplinary approach. Through an examination of 31 different projects a flood crowdsourcing typology was developed. This identified five key types of flood crowdsourcing: i) Incident Reporting, ii) Media Engagement, iii) Collaborative Mapping, iv) Online Volunteering and v) Passive VGI. These represent a wide range of initiatives with radically different aims, objectives, datasets and relationships with volunteers. Online Volunteering was explored in greater detail using Tomnod as a case study. This is a micro-tasking platform in which volunteers analyse satellite imagery to support disaster response. Volunteer motivations for participating on Tomnod were found to be largely altruistic. Demographics of participants were significant, with retirement, disability or long-term health problems identified as major drivers for participation. Many participants emphasised that effective communication between volunteers and the site owner is strongly linked to their appreciation of the platform. In addition, the feedback on the quality and impact of their contributions was found to be crucial in maintaining interest. Through an examination of their contributions, volunteers were found to be able to ascertain with a higher degree of accuracy, many features in satellite imagery which supervised image classification struggled to identify. This was more pronounced in poorer quality imagery where image classification had a very low accuracy. However, supervised classification was found to be far more systematic and succeeded in identifying impacts in many regions which were missed by volunteers. The efficacy of using crowdsourcing for flood risk management was explored further through the iterative development of a Collaborative Mapping web-platform called Floodcrowd. Through interviews and focus groups, stakeholders from the public and private sector expressed an interest in crowdsourcing as a tool for supporting flood risk management. Types of data which stakeholders are particularly interested in with regards to crowdsourcing differ between organisations. Yet, they typically include flood depths, photos, timeframes of events and historical background information. Through engagement activities, many citizens were found to be able and motivated to share such observations. Yet, motivations were strongly affected by the level of attention their contributions receive from authorities. This presents many opportunities as well as challenges for ensuring that the future of flood crowdsourcing improves flood risk management and does not damage stakeholder relationships with participants

Mining Patterns for Web-based Emergency Management Systems

6 pages, 1 figure.-- Contributed to: 4th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM2007, Delft, the Netherlands, May 13-16, 2007).Design patterns describe problems that occur recurrently, and specify the core of the solution in such a way that we can (re)use it in different contexts and applications. Although, web-based Emergency Management Systems domain is still in its nascent stages, there are design principles, real systems and design patterns from other related areas that can be a valuable source of knowledge to mine design patterns. From these sources we have created a patterns catalogue to assist novice designers on discovering what issues should be addressed to develop useful and successful systems. In this paper, we present the mining process and some patterns as example.This work is supported by the ARCE++ project (TSI2004-03394) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (MEC) and a cooperation agreement between "Universidad Carlos III de Madrid" and "Dirección General de Protección Civil y Emergencias" (Ministry of the Interior).Publicad

Coalition Modeling In Humanitarian Assistance Operations

Multinational operations are carried out to achieve military and diplomatic objectives in various regions. Such operations derive a great deal of benefits from sharing budgets, political legitimacy, sharing each national experience and technological resources, and so forth. However, a coalition, one structure of multinational operations, often involves serious challenges in such areas as command and control, logistic support, communication and language, training, and intelligence and information due to its ad hoc characteristics. This research reviews general problems in a coalition operation, and develops the Coalition Operation Planning Model to assist coalition commanders or staff in producing an efficient operational plan. In this model, goal programming is employed to formulate the coalition problems with multiple objectives. The proposed model is composed of three sub-models: the Coalition Mission-Unit Allocation Model, the Coalition Mission-Support Model, and the Coalition Mission-Unit Grouping Model. The first sub-model is designed to find an optimized resource allocation by applying the shortest path problem and effectiveness functions. The second sub-model is developed to obtain an optimized logistics support plan by using the multi-commodity network flow. Finally, the third sub-model is designed to combine small units into one workable independent unit by using the quadratic assignment problem. The models are demonstrated with a notional humanitarian assistance operation

Volunteering for Impact: Best Practices in International Corporate Volunteering

Although multinational corporations invest significant resources in international corporate volunteering (ICV), a disproportionate emphasis is often placed on the quantity of activity rather than potential impact. Multinational corporations are slowly moving from traditional measures, like counting volunteers and hours of service, to adopting more strategic measures built around increasing business or social impacts. Companies are evolving ICV programs to strategic partnerships that focus on high-value skills transfer, capacity building and scalability, and driving outcomes beyond conventional philanthropic tools. FSG Social Impact Advisors released Volunteering for Impact, a compilation of best practices in international corporate volunteering (ICV). Sponsored by Pfizer Inc and The Brookings Institution, the study examines ICV within two principal models: local service, in which employees based in countries outside headquarters volunteer in their local communities; and cross-border service, in which employees travel abroad to volunteer. After numerous interviews and the analysis of ICV programs at 14 multinational corporations, FSG detailed current programs and made recommendations to guide corporate philanthropy executives and ICV program managers as they build high impact volunteering programs

Social Media, Rumors, and Hurricane Warning Systems in Puerto Rico

Disaster warning systems are a form of risk communication that allow national, state, and local actors to prepare for, respond to, and understand disaster risk. The increased use of social media platforms to exchange information around disasters challenges traditional, centralized forms of risk communication. While social media is already used in emergency management to some degree, issues of trust and reliability of information limit the widespread adoption of social media into emergency management practices. This paper offers a case study of the role that social media information plays in Puerto Rico’s hurricane early warning system and highlights the affordances and limitations of decentralized, heterarchical communication forms around disasters for federal, state, and local-level emergency management authorities. The case highlights differences in perception of social media information around disasters by emergency management authorities and by community members both before and after Hurricane Maria in 2017

A Hundred Key Questions for the Post-2015 Development Agenda

With a new development framework under way and an increasingly urgent need to address political, socioeconomic and environmental issues on a global scale, this is a critical moment for the international development agenda. Almost 15 years after the Millennium Declaration, a new phase for international development is about to begin and, with it, comes the opportunity to critically assess how new development goals and milestones are likely to be shaped and delivered. This paper assumes that a greater understanding of development needs and practices can better sustain a new agenda for change, and that a key step in this process is to identify priorities based on both new and long-standing knowledge gaps, to help orient decision-making processes and funding allocation in academia and beyond. This paper present the results of a consultative and participatory exercise that addresses the need to articulate and better align the research interests and priorities of academics and practitioners working on international development in a post-2015 international development framework. The exercise was organized around a two-stage consultation and shortlisting process. A four-months open consultation was conducted, offering development stakeholders and individuals the opportunity to submit their questions. People were invited to submit questions related to some of the thematic priorities that guided the “World We Want” campaign—a global stakeholder consultation conducted by the UN between 2010 and 2014 involving governments, civil society and lay citizens. In this first phase, 705 individuals from 109 organizations based in 34 countries were involved in the formulation of 704 questions. The questions were then discussed and shortlisted during a two-day workshop with academic and practitioners representing different world regions and areas of expertise, among whom are also the authors of this paper. After the final shortlisting, questions were regrouped into nine macro-thematic sections: governance, participation and rights; environmental sustainability; food security, land and agriculture; energy and natural resources; conflict, population dynamics and urbanization; economic growth, employment and the private sector; social and economic inequalities; health and education; development policies, practices and institutions. The final 100 questions address a varied combination of long-standing problems that have hindered the development agenda for decades as well as new challenges emerging from broader socioeconomic, political and environmental changes. Well-established concerns about the rights of women, and of vulnerable groups such as poor workers, small-scale farmers, people with disabilities, children and ethnic minorities feature alongside emerging issues, including the role of business in protecting human rights, and information and communication technologies as tools for empowerment and social integration. Similarly, traditional concerns linked to rural livelihoods, land tenure and agricultural production are presented together with environmental sustainability, natural resource extraction, urbanization, food security, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. While civil society and the empowerment of marginalized populations are recognized as key for development, questions on new actors including the private sector, emerging economic powers and new middle-income countries as development donors and partners feature heavily in the shortlist. The questions also reflect the mainstreaming of gender perspectives into a wide range of development areas, helping to cement the view that gender should be considered central to future development initiatives. A large number of the submitted questions (102) specifically addressed broader issues related to development politics, practices and institutions. This outcome, combined with the fact that a number of these were included in the final shortlist, highlights the fact that there is a critical need for a deeper collective reflection on the role and relationships of different actors in international development, and the impact that contemporary economic and political scenarios will have on the development agenda. We envision our list of 100 questions contributing to inform the post-2015 agenda and future development-related research priorities of international, governmental and non-governmental organizations. But, perhaps more centrally, we believe that these questions can act as starting points for debate, research and collaboration between academics, practitioners and policy makers. The value of research exercises such as this one rely on the ability of a variety of stakeholders to reach consensus around a set of research priorities put forward by anyone willing to engage in the process. We believe that the process of co-production we set out here, of debate and discussion between different stakeholders, is essential for successfully and effectively tackling the key challenges ahead for the international development agenda

Philanthropy in Disasters: Tsunami and After: Corporate Philanthropy in Thailand

A compilation of background papers presented during the conference of the same name, this publication is divided into five sections and a three-page bibliography. It focuses on corporate philanthropy in Thailand following the December 2004 tsunami in South East Asia. The compilation was prepared for the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium

End-user oriented strategies to facilitate multi-organizational adoption of emergency management information systems

11 pages, 4 figures.Response to large-scale emergencies is a cooperative process that requires the active and coordinated participation of a variety of functionally independent agencies operating in adjacent regions. In practice, this essential cooperation is sometimes not attained or is reduced due to poor information sharing, non-fluent communication flows, and lack of coordination. We report an empirical study of IT-mediated cooperation among Spanish response agencies and we describe the challenges of adoption, information sharing, communication flows, and coordination among agencies that do not share a unity of command. We analyze three strategies aimed at supporting acceptance and surmounting political, organizational and personal distrust or skepticism: participatory design, advanced collaborative tools inducing cognitive absorption, and end-user communities of practice.This work has been funded by the Grant (PR2007-0271) and the Research Project (TSI2007-60388) of Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. SIGAME is a project funded by Dirección General de Protección Civil y Emergencias of Spanish Ministry of Interior.Publicad

A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Corporate Social Responsibility Practices: America and China

This study examines the cross-cultural similarities and differences of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices between leading America companies and leading Chinese companies. It pays particular attention to the why, what, how and where of CSR practices and discovers how these companies manage and localize their efforts through the comparison of corporate websites. Utilizing corporate websites to perform a content analysis, fifty of the top American Fortune 500 businesses were analyzed. The results from the fifty American Fortune 500 companies were then compared to twenty-three top Chinese Fortune 50 companies. The codebook elements that were used to compare CSR practices between America and China revealed few similarities and many differences. Through analyzing corporate websites, the results of this study revealed that leading American companies are more advanced in recording and publicizing CSR efforts than leading Chinese companies