Effective Use of Information Systems for Emergency Management: a Representation Theory Perspective

Effective Use Theory (EUT) has emerged as a promising native Information Systems (IS) theory to understand a central phenomenon of interest to the discipline: the effective use of information systems. While EUT is widely accepted in operational control and management control contexts, its validity in chaotic environments has yet to be demonstrated. To contribute to the research program in EUT, scholars called for contextualizing and assessing EUT in chaotic environment, such as emergencies or crises events. This research seeks to apply EUT to understand the effective use of emergency information systems (EMIS). Seeking a grand theory of effective use in EMIS helps the onset of a structured research program and the development of a cumulative research tradition. That fosters EMIS as a would-be reference discipline for cross-disciplinary scholarship in emergency management. Moreover, assessing EUT in the edge context of emergencies, contributes to theory development by problematizing on assumptions that scholars have been considering unproblematic

112.social: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Crisis App for Bidirectional Communication between Emergency Services and Citizens

Emergencies threaten human lives and overall societal continuity, whether or not the crises and disasters are induced by nature, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, or by human beings, such as accidents, terror attacks and uprisings. In such situations, not only do citizens demand information about the damage and safe behaviour, but emergency services also require high quality information to improve situational awareness. For this purpose, there are currently two kinds of apps available: General-purpose apps, such as Facebook Safety Check or Twitter Alerts, already integrate safety features. Specific crisis apps, such as KATWARN in Germany or FEMA in the US, provide information on how to behave before, during and after emergencies, and capabilities for reporting incidents or receiving disaster warnings. In this paper, we analyse authorities’ and citizens’ information demands and features of crisis apps. Moreover, we present the concept, implementation and evaluation of a crisis app for incident reporting and bidirectional communication between authorities and citizens. Using the app, citizens may (1) report incidents by providing a category, description, location and multimedia files and (2) receive broadcasts and responses from authorities. Finally, we outline features, requirements and contextual factors for incident reporting and bidirectional communication via mobile app

Enablers in Crisis Information Management: A Literature Review

Social media often plays a central role in crisis informatics as it is an important source for assessing, understanding, and locating crises quickly and accurately. In addition, social media enables actors to react more effectively and efficiently when managing crises. However, enablers of crisis information management have not been carved out explicitly in a systematic view. Therefore, we perform a literature review to synthesize the existing literature on crisis information management with a focus on technical enablers and their classification into the crisis-management phases. As our results show, searching for crisis informatics mostly results in social media-related publications. We found that Twitter is one of the most important technical enablers but that research on other social media platforms is underrepresented. Also, most publications center on the post-crisis phases of crisis management, leaving out the pre-crisis phases

A TWITTER-INTEGRATED WEB SYSTEM TO AGGREGATE AND PROCESS EMERGENCY-RELATED DATA

A major challenge when encountering time-sensitive, information critical emergencies is to source raw volunteered data from on-site public sources and extract information which can enhance awareness on the emergency itself from a geographical context. This research explores the use of Twitter in the emergency domain by developing a Twitter-integrated web system capable of aggregating and processing emergency-related tweet data. The objectives of the project are to collect volunteered tweet data on emergencies by public citizen sources via the Twitter API, process the data based on geo-location information and syntax into organized informational entities relevant to an emergency, and subsequently deliver the information on a map-like interface. The web system framework is targeted for use by organizations which seek to transform volunteered emergency-related data available on the Twitter platform into timely, useful emergency alerts which can enhance situational awareness, and is intended to be accessible to the public through a user-friendly web interface. Rapid Application Development (RAD) is the methodology of choice for project development. The developed system has a system usability scale score of 84.25, after results were tabulated from a usability survey on 20 respondents. Said system is best for use in emergencies where the transmission timely, quantitative data is of paramount importance, and is a useful framework on extracting and displaying useful emergency alerts with a geographical perspective based on volunteered citizen Tweets. It is hoped that the project can ultimately contribute to the existing domain of knowledge on social media-assisted emergency applications

The role of social media for collective behaviour development in response to natural disasters

With the emergence of social media, user-generated content from people affected by disasters has gained significant importance. Thus far, research has focused on identifying categories and taxonomies of the types of information being shared among users during times of disasters. However, there is a lack of theorizing with the dynamics of and relationships between the identified concepts. In our current research, we applied probabilistic topic modelling approach to identify topics from Chennai disaster Twitter data. We manually interpreted and further clustered the topics into generic categories and themes, and traced their development over the days of the disaster. Finally, we build a process model to explore an emerging phenomenon on social media during a disaster. We argue that the conditions/activities such as collective awareness, collective concern, collective empathy and support are necessary conditions for people to feel, respond, and act as forms of collective behaviour

Making evaluations matter: a practical guide for evaluators

This guide is primarily for evaluators working in the international development sector. It is also useful for commissioner of evaluations, evaluation managers and M&E officers. The guide explains how to make evaluations more useful. It helps to better understand conceptual issues and appreciate how evaluations can contribute to changing mindsets and empowering stakeholders. On a practical level, the guide presents core guiding principles and pointers on how to design and facilitate evaluations that matter. Furthermore, it shows how to get primary intended users and other key stakeholders to contribute effectively to the evaluation proces

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

Twitter and Disasters: A Social Resilience Fingerprint

Understanding the resilience of a community facing a crisis event is critical to improving its adaptive capacity. Community resilience has been conceptualized as a function of the resilience of components of a community such as ecological, infrastructure, economic, and social systems, etc. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a “resilience fingerprint” and propose a multi-dimensional method for analyzing components of community resilience by leveraging existing definitions of community resilience with data from the social network Twitter. Twitter data from 14 events are analyzed and their resulting resilience fingerprints computed. We compare the fingerprints between events and show that major disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes have a unique resilience fingerprint which is consistent between different events of the same type. Specifically, hurricanes have a distinct fingerprint which differentiates them from other major events. We analyze the components underlying the similarity among hurricanes and find that ecological, infrastructure and economic components of community resilience are the primary drivers of the difference between the community resilience of hurricanes and other major events