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

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

Networked Urbanism and Disaster

In a world of networked urbanism, where people affected by disaster connect intensively with each other, the media and emergency agencies, why do warnings go amiss? Why does knowledge of risk not translate into preparedness? Why are the mobilities of information so poorly understood? In this chapter, we build on a synthesis of insights from disaster management, policy, mobilities and design research, and science and technology studies (STS) to study how these disaster-related networked mobilities create complex landscapes of communication, interdependence and responsibility that are difficult to translate into preparedness. Our analysis informs, and is informed by, research collaborations with emergency responders, engineers and technology designers with the aim of understanding and developing social and digital technologies for collaboration. By bringing attention to new networked partnerships, we aim to provide a set of critical tools with which to consider practices of risk governance as an example of networked urbanism

ELSI guidelines for networked collaboration and information exchange in PPDR and risk governance

Networked collaboration and information exchange technologies have transformative potential for PPDR and risk governance. However, it is difficult to shape these transformations in a way that supports real world practices of collaboration and sense-making, and it is even more difficult to do so in ways that are ethically, legally and socially sensitive and proactive. This paper presents efforts to construct Ethical, Legal and Social Issues or ‘ELSI’ Guidelines for Networked Collaboration and Information Exchange in PPDR. The Guidelines would facilitate Risk Governance and serve as a living community resource to support the design and use of IT for PPDR and Risk Governanc

Visualizing risk:making sense of collaborative disaster mapping

This paper examines the relationship between collaborative disaster mapping and conceptions of risk. It looks at the practice of mapmaking during the 2007 wildfires in Southern California to explore sociotechnological issues in creating a shared understanding. By comparing and contrasting how two different, yet intertwined, maps were made this paper focuses on how the sociotechnical acts of alignment necessary for the production of the maps change how risk, threat and uncertainty are approached. One mapmaking practice pulled the actors into a more centralized alignment producing risks related to managing authority and security. The other provided a more distributed collaboration and produced risks related to public trust and consistency. This paper argues that mapmaking is characterized as a messy, distributed network of knowledge production in which the meaning of risk emerges through the collaborations that evolve in making sense of the wildfires, not as an a priori definition

Producing space, tracing authority:mapping the 2007 San Diego wildfires

This article explores the materiality of disaster politics through the practice of mapping during the 2007 wildfires in Southern California. It examines the process of production of two different maps, the maps produced by San Diego County and a popular Google My Map created by local media and academic institutions, in order to explore how an unfolding disaster comes to be understood. This article argues that the interplay between different technological and human entities to produce each map in turn produced different spaces of disaster in ways that challenged priorities of disaster preparedness and response. Specifically, the different mapping practices in 2007 produced different relationships to temporality, boundaries and responsibility, making different aspects of the disaster visible while constructing different threats and definitions of danger. They juxtaposed representational and relational knowledge as well as the value of prevention and demonstration. This article draws on data collected through textual analysis of government and scientific documents as well as interviews and observations of key actors, their mapping practices, and socio-technological networks

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

Mapping a Wildfire : : Mapping Practices, Authoritative Knowledge, and the Unpredictable Nature of Disaster

This dissertation examines the relationship between mapping a wildfire, production of knowledge about the wildfire, and general understandings of regional risk and disaster expertise. It takes as its starting point maps made during the 2007 wildfires, centering around a Google My Map made by an ad-hoc network that improvised their way through their mapmaking. It asks : how did making these maps under the duress of the disaster create a way of knowing the disaster that was valued by scientists, first responders, journalists, and the public alike? Why did an ad-hoc map gain the authority it did to describe the unfolding disaster? In approaching these questions, this interdisciplinary project draws on science and technology studies, communication studies, visual culture studies, critical geography, and disaster studies to treat disasters as spatial practices rather than external features imposed upon spaces at specific times. This project uses mixed-methods that look backwards and forwards, beyond the immediacy of the hazard being faced to understand how value and authority are attributed to the maps. To do so, it links historical methods of fire tracking and communication, social and technical wildfire mapping networks and practices from 2007, and imagined potentials, future expectations, and anticipated disasters as they have played out in disaster mapping since 2007. It also situates these practices within networks of actions that were human, technological, and environmental. This project finds that how a disaster is made knowable shapes what is considered authoritative, conceptions of risk, and what qualifies as threat. It suggests that temporality is a primary organizer of uncertainty, accuracy, and thus a map's value. Only when representational practices remained flexible enough to incorporate local resources and changes over time yet were presented in stable and standard enough ways to share information between diverse groups were these practices able to establish authoritative stances in relation to general knowledge about the disasters. As importantly, this project argues that knowledge and expertise are distributed, something that, if acknowledged in mapmaking, can capture within a map some of the dynamism and multiplicity of meaning that exists within any disaste

Mobile work in crisis

This paper explores some of the complexities and practices of the massively distributed and mobile work of crisis response. The analysis is motivated by our work of applying insights from social science studies to socio-technical and organisational innovation in crisis management. Insights from ethnographic observations of physically mobilising a multi-agency emergency response are contrasted with a study of troubles in mobilising data for multi-agency and cross border collaboration in crisis management. The analysis shows that a situated interactive order of trust as well as reflexive social and material practices that make for productive rapports are critical for good collaboration. We explore how a deeper understanding of such practices can shed light upon difficulties encountered around supporting interoperability based in immaterial mobile work of networked collaborations