Information systems (IS) in emergency management (EM) support situational awareness and agility during a disaster so that professionals do not only need to follow rigid pre-defined plans that might... Show More

Information systems (IS) in emergency management (EM) support situational awareness and agility during a disaster so that professionals do not only need to follow rigid pre-defined plans that might be unsuitable in the unfolding situation. To use IS effectively, managers need an understanding of the capabilities of these systems; this can be achieved through an appropriate set of educational courses. This article presents the results of the analysis of a survey that proposed EM and IS courses for master level programs. The survey was completed by 373 practitioners, academics and/or researchers with EM experience. All proposed courses were rated above a 4 on a 7-point scale for how essential they are to a curriculum. A qualitative analysis indicates that some low ratings were due to disagreement over the described course content. An unexpected finding was that a substantial number of respondents spontaneously expressed opposition to the use of IS for EM in general. Findings are discussed and a preliminary curriculum is proposed.

Crisis response, including humanitarian operations, is a highly complex field and its effectiveness is challenged by the dynamic partnerships of organizations involved and critical field conditions.... Show More

Crisis response, including humanitarian operations, is a highly complex field and its effectiveness is challenged by the dynamic partnerships of organizations involved and critical field conditions. Serious gaming is recognized as an effective method for complex systems design and analysis. Given the criticality of complex humanitarian operations and the current challenges faced by humanitarians in crisis response, serious gaming could play an important role in this field. However, the full potential of serious gaming in humanitarian assistance has not been fully explored yet. This article examines the role of serious gaming in assisting humanitarian operations. A board game is developed and played to examine its role in facilitating requirement engineering and training for humanitarian missions. In the contribution, the authors show how they were able to address the vital challenges faced by humanitarian aid workers in crisis response. Additionally, the outcomes of game sessions and their implications for humanitarian operations of the future was discussed.

Human behaviour during crisis evacuations is social in nature. In particular, social attachment theory posits that proximity of familiar people, places, objects, etc., promotes calm and a feeling of... Show More

Human behaviour during crisis evacuations is social in nature. In particular, social attachment theory posits that proximity of familiar people, places, objects, etc., promotes calm and a feeling of safety, while their absence triggers panic or flight. In closely bonded groups such as families, members seek each other and evacuate as one. This makes attachment bonds necessary in the development of realistic models of mobility during crises. This article presents a review of evacuation behaviour, theories on social attachment, crisis mobility, and agent-based models. It was found that social attachment influences mobility in the different stages of evacuation (pre, during and post). Based on these findings, a multi-agent model of mobility during seismic crises (SOLACE) is being developed, and it is implemented using the belief, desire and intention (BDI) agent architecture.

Terrorism targeting corporate bodies remains one the greatest risks to the most critical intangible asset of any organization: reputation. Thus, effective crisis communication is critical during and... Show More

Terrorism targeting corporate bodies remains one the greatest risks to the most critical intangible asset of any organization: reputation. Thus, effective crisis communication is critical during and after terror crisis to mitigate further damage on the reputation. To date, many studies around the globe have tended to focus on the role of the traditional media during terror crisis, paying minimal attention to organisations' use of social media during terror crisis. Using a descriptive qualitative case study, this study examined the role of social media during 2013 Westgate Mall terror attack, in Nairobi, Kenya. Findings revealed that the Interior Ministry (IM) used Twitter as the preferred social media platform to communicate with various stakeholders. Accommodative crisis response strategies were the most used by the IM. However, the ministry was plagued with inaccuracies and inconsistencies in its responses on social media compromising reputation of the government further. Balancing the need for speedy response, accuracy and consistency, remained the greatest challenge for the IM.

One in every 70 people around the world is caught up in a crisis (natural disasters, conflict, climate change, etc.) and urgently needs humanitarian assistance and protection according to the OCHA.... Show More

One in every 70 people around the world is caught up in a crisis (natural disasters, conflict, climate change, etc.) and urgently needs humanitarian assistance and protection according to the OCHA. The humanitarian community assists millions of people every year based on emerging humanitarian needs. Most of the time, the conditions inside the countries, once the humanitarian needs data is collected, are not very conducive and required simple ways to collect data like paper-based data collection with simple questions. This data is later entered into a database or spreadsheet using rigorous and time-consuming data entry efforts. Dynamic changes in needs of people; numbers of partners involved; the complexity of evolving processes; and emerging technologies over time has led to a change in processes for data collection and management. This article is an attempt to capture humanitarian data collection best practices and the use of different technologies in managing data to facilitate humanitarian needs assessment processes for the Syria crisis.

Huge amounts of data generated on social media during emergency situations is regarded as a trove of critical information. The use of supervised machine learning techniques in the early stages of a... Show More

Huge amounts of data generated on social media during emergency situations is regarded as a trove of critical information. The use of supervised machine learning techniques in the early stages of a crisis is challenged by the lack of labeled data for that event. Furthermore, supervised models trained on labeled data from a prior crisis may not produce accurate results, due to inherent crisis variations. To address these challenges, the authors propose a hybrid feature-instance-parameter adaptation approach based on matrix factorization, k-nearest neighbors, and self-training. The proposed feature-instance adaptation selects a subset of the source crisis data that is representative for the target crisis data. The selected labeled source data, together with unlabeled target data, are used to learn self-training domain adaptation classifiers for the target crisis. Experimental results have shown that overall the hybrid domain adaptation classifiers perform better than the supervised classifiers learned from the original source data.

Research on technology-assisted crisis management have been centered on tools to assist the response phase of a disaster. Through a semantic network analysis of concept relations in the titles of... Show More

Research on technology-assisted crisis management have been centered on tools to assist the response phase of a disaster. Through a semantic network analysis of concept relations in the titles of the publications, the authors found that many theoretical tools exist for disaster management but have not been operationalized to take a holistic approach toward technology for resilience. There is a lack of emphasis on the design of information and communication technologies, besides geographical information systems, to assist other phases of the crisis management cycle, particularly the preparedness and mitigation phases for resilience. By operationalizing the MOVE framework in a case study, the authors discover factors critical to the design of informatics and visualization tools to support resilience. This study concludes with a conceptual design framework “Digital Crow's Nest” to show feasibility of technology design for disaster resilience analytics using open data sources.

To strengthen the capability of societies to manage severe events, it is vital to understand what constitutes crisis management capability and how this can be assessed. The objective of this article... Show More

To strengthen the capability of societies to manage severe events, it is vital to understand what constitutes crisis management capability and how this can be assessed. The objective of this article is to explore how interorganizational crisis management capability has been assessed in the scientific literature. A systematic literature review was performed, resulting in a dataset of 83 publications. A thematic analysis resulted in nine themes of crisis management capability being identified, where interaction was the largest one. Analyses resulted in a comprehensive overview of assessment methods within the themes. The evaluation methods were mainly applied on real cases rather than exercises. The present article contributes with an increased understanding of how crisis management capability is evaluated, as well as applicability and limitations of different methodological approaches. This insight is essential in order to conduct a valid assessment of crisis management capability and design exercises that increase this capability.

Infectious diseases remain a threat to public health, requiring the coordinated action of many stakeholders. Little has been written about stakeholder participation and approaches to sharing... Show More

Infectious diseases remain a threat to public health, requiring the coordinated action of many stakeholders. Little has been written about stakeholder participation and approaches to sharing information, in dynamic contexts and under time pressure as is the case for infectious disease outbreaks. Communicable-disease specialists fear that delays in implementing control measures may occur if stakeholders are not included in the outbreak-management process. Two case studies described in this article show how the needs of stakeholders may vary with time and that early sharing of information takes priority over shared decision-making. The stakeholders itemized their needs and potential contributions in order to arrive at the collective interest of outbreak management. For this, the results suggest the potential for improvement through development of “network governance” including the effective sharing of information in large networks with varying needs. Outbreaks in which conflicting perceptions may occur among the stakeholders require particular attention.