Mapping Disaster: Tracing the 2007 San Diego Wildfires as Distributed Practice

This article examines the production of a highly referenced yet unofficial Google map made during the 2007 wildfires in Southern California to track the unfolding disaster in order to explore how, under duress of disaster, diverse actors and technologies interact to produce mutually legitimate ways of knowing that disaster. Drawing on informal interviews of key actors in the production of the map as well as textual analysis of government and scientific documents regarding the wildfires, I explore the improvisational practices that took shape in order to better understand how diverse voices, often non-authoritative ones, become part of the collective knowledge of that disaster. Engaging with visual culture studies, critical geography and science and technology studies, I expand upon the complexity of the relationship between representation and world, and argue that no single person, technology, or environmental factor was in control of the mapping practice. I find that the legitimacy and value of the map is to be found in the ad-­‐hoc and often problematic interactions that produced the map, where wildfire expertise is not located in a specific training or position in society, but distributed over the network of interactions. Analyzing the relationship between representational practice and knowledge in this way, I argue, can help make visible how valued forms of knowledge were not determined a priori to the wildfires or map, but came into being along with the map

Data in Crisis: anticipating risk, vulnerability, and resilience through communication infrastructures

This paper explores the implications of having interactions around crises progressively based in information and communication technology (ICT), data, and their infrastructures. Drawing on applied research from multidisciplinary projects to design crisis ICT, we describe the how these tools become fundamental to how crisis communication and governance can and does work. Crisis ICT facilitate collaboration and interoperability in ways that make it possible for crisis managers to share each other’s strategies, processes, goals, and perspectives. They also bring together different histories of risk assessment practices and socio-political situations. Combining them meaningfully requires anyone working with the ICT to actively negotiate and deliberate what that combined view includes. We examine a series of tensions raised by infrastructuringdiverse crisis data and discuss what they mean for conceptions of crisis risk, vulnerability, and resilience. First, are tensions that emerge when trying to provide an underpinning logic that makes data shareable and comparable. Second, are the dynamics that come from misunderstandings as crisis practitioners from different disciplines and cultures engage with each other through these infrastructures. Third are the tensions raised through the anticipatory conflicts between concrete data needs of a technology and the uncertainties of how crises unfold. Finally, we consider how these infrastructures stabilise crises to make them visible, actionable, and contestable. We argue that crisis communication requires reflexive perspectives, building into all communication practices mechanisms by which actors can be mutually responsive to each other. Our aim is to provoke those engaging with such tools to consider how risk, vulnerability, resilience, and the lived experience of crises are intertwined with the infrastructures that make communication possible

An Unfinished Canvas: Local Partnerships in Support of Arts Education in California

In 2006, at the request of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, SRI International conducted a study aimed at assessing the status of arts education in California relative to state goals. The final report, An Unfinished Canvas. Arts Education in California: Taking Stock of Policy and Practice, revealed a substantial gap between policy and practice. The study found that elementary schools in particular are failing to meet state goals for arts education. In light of these findings, The Hewlett Foundation commissioned a series of follow-up studies to identify policy mechanisms or other means of increasing student access to arts education. This study, focusing on the ability of school districts to leverage support for arts education through partnerships with local arts organizations, is one of the follow-up studies.Partnerships may allow for the pooling of resources and lend support to schools in a variety of ways including artists-in-residency programs, professional development for teachers, exposing students to the arts through the provision of one-time performances at school sites, and organizing field trips to performances and exhibits. According to the California Visual and Performing Arts Framework for California Public Schools, partnerships among districts, schools, and arts organizations are most successful when they are embedded within a comprehensive, articulated program of arts education. Questions about the nature of partnerships that California districts and schools have been able to form with arts organizations, and the success of these partnerships to increase students' access to a sequential standards-based course of study in the four arts disciplines, served as the impetus for this study.A team of SRI researchers conducted case studies of partnerships between districts and arts organizations in six diverse California communities in spring 2008. The case study sites were selected for their particular arts education activities and diverse contexts and, as a result, do not offer generalizable data about partnerships between school districts and arts organizations in California. Instead, we highlight the ways that a sample of partnerships promotes arts education in California elementary schools to inform others who may be interested in building partnerships between school districts and arts organizations

Designing with users:Co-design for innovation in emergency technologies

The ever more pervasive ‘informationalization’ of crisis management and response brings both unprecedented opportunities and challenges. Recent years have seen the emergence of attention to ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) in the field of Information and Communication Technology. However, disclosing (and addressing) ELSI issues in design is still a challenge because they are inherently relational, arising from interactions between people, the material and design of the artifact, and the context. In this article, we discuss approaches for addressing such ‘deeper’ and ‘wider’ political implications, values and ethical, legal and social implications that arise between practices, people and technology. Based on a case study from the BRIDGE project, which has provided the opportunity for deep engagement with these issues through the concrete exploration and experimentation with technologically augmented practices of emergency response, we present insights from our interdisciplinary work aiming to make design and innovation projects ELSI-aware. Crucially, we have seen in our study a need for a shift from privacy by design towards designing for privacy, collaboration, trust, accessibility, ownership, transparency etc., acknowledging that these are emergent practices that we cannot control by design, but rather that we can help to design for—calling for approaches that allow to make ELSI issues explicit and addressable in design-time

Next generation, secure cloud-based pan-European information system for enhanced disaster awareness

Information management in disaster situations is challenging, yet critical for efficient response and recovery. Today information flows are difficult to establish, partial, redundant, overly complex or insecure, besides the interoperability between heterogeneous organisations is limited. This paper presents a novel system architecture that enables combining of several communication technologies in a secure manner. This supports creation of a pan-European 'Common Information Space' by rescue organizations that can enable more efficient and effective information management in disaster response. Moreover, this technology can be used for disaster preparedness (e.g., training, tutorials). The modular architecture is designed to consider future evolutions of technology by defining interfaces for the integration of new technologies and services

Prescribed fluid consumption and its effects on the physiology and work behaviour of Australian wildland firefighters

The present study examined firefighters\u27 ability to consume a prescribed fluid volume (1200 ml &middot; h-1) during a wildland fire suppression shift and compare the effect of this additional fluid prescription with self-paced drinking on firefighters\u27 hydration status and plasma sodium concentration post shift and their heart rate, core temperature and physical activity during their shift. Thirty-four firefighters were evenly divided into two drinking groups: self paced and prescribed. Prescribed drinkers did not meet the required 1200 ml&middot;h-1 intake, yet they consumed twice the fluid drank by the self-paced group. No differences were noted between groups in plasma sodium levels or hydration status before or after their shift. Prescribed fluid consumption resulted in significantly lower core temperature between two and six hours into the shift. This did not coincide with lower cardiovascular strain, greater physical activity when compared to the self-paced drinking group. Additional fluid consumption (above self-paced intake) did not improve firefighter activity or physiological function (though it may buffer rising core temperature). It seems that wildland firefighters, at least in mild to warm weather conditions, can self-regulate their fluid consumption and work behaviour to leave the fireground hydrated at the conclusion of their shift.<br /

Intersecting Intelligence:An Exploration of Big Data Disruptions

This chapter explores ambiguous forms of emergent practices around big data use for crises in order to produce a set of questions and uncover a range of issues that might enable “better” ways of working with big data. Combining big data with crisis situations frames complex socio-political problems such as the refugee crisis that is current at the time of writing as problems of intelligence and information/data. By focusing on crisis it becomes possible to see how questions around data use need to shift from asking what is in the data to include discussion of how the data is structured and how this structure codifies value systems and social practices, subject positions and forms of visibility and invisibility – and thus forms of surveillance, and the very ideas of crisis, risk governance and preparedness. At the same time, Big data could be a technology for collaboration in relation to the complex causes and consequences of disasters, heightening awareness of vulnerabilities and capacities for response, and fostering consideration of the distribution of risks. Moreover, by highlighting fault lines of injustice before disaster strikes, risk governance augmented by big data could raise hopes for the development of communities of risk (Beck, 1999) and a more relational ethics of risk (Büscher et al. 2017), where ‘it would not take a hurricane to make visible the plight of the poor’ (Jasanoff 2007, 33) or a refugee crisis to highlight a need for integrated European and global responses to displacement

Intersecting Intelligence:An Exploration of Big Data Disruptions

This chapter explores ambiguous forms of emergent practices around big data use for crises in order to produce a set of questions and uncover a range of issues that might enable “better” ways of working with big data. Combining big data with crisis situations frames complex socio-political problems such as the refugee crisis that is current at the time of writing as problems of intelligence and information/data. By focusing on crisis it becomes possible to see how questions around data use need to shift from asking what is in the data to include discussion of how the data is structured and how this structure codifies value systems and social practices, subject positions and forms of visibility and invisibility – and thus forms of surveillance, and the very ideas of crisis, risk governance and preparedness. At the same time, Big data could be a technology for collaboration in relation to the complex causes and consequences of disasters, heightening awareness of vulnerabilities and capacities for response, and fostering consideration of the distribution of risks. Moreover, by highlighting fault lines of injustice before disaster strikes, risk governance augmented by big data could raise hopes for the development of communities of risk (Beck, 1999) and a more relational ethics of risk (Büscher et al. 2017), where ‘it would not take a hurricane to make visible the plight of the poor’ (Jasanoff 2007, 33) or a refugee crisis to highlight a need for integrated European and global responses to displacement

On anonymity in disasters:Socio-technical practices in emergency management

Disasters are often thought of as exceptions to the norm, where it is ethical to break rules in order to maintain social order and security. Indeed, such exceptions are recognised in high-level international legal provisions such as the European Union’s (EU) Data Protection Regulation, building the expectation that during disasters systems of data sharing and protecting, including anonymity, will have to balance the urgency of the situation, the effort to manage those regulations, and the risks being faced in order to provide the security these protections intend. This paper explores what this means for the practice of anonymity as it examines the tensions between the social and technical practices behind information sharing for disaster management. By examining anonymity as a practice both in relation to how information is sourced from a community being protected and to how information is shared between organisations doing the protecting, this paper opens up the black box of information sharing during disasters to begin to unpack how trust, community, liability, and protection are entangled. As disaster management exposes and juxtapose social and organisational elements that make it work, we find that what anonymity means, and the security and protection anonymity offers, creates a mélange of hope of unprejudiced reception, protection from liabilities, opportunities for shared meaning, limitations to solidarity, reinforcement of power struggles and norms, and the ability to mask difference