| Practices of Stigmergy in the Building Process | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 1-19 | |
| Lars Rune Christensen | |||
| Actors coordinate their cooperative efforts by acting on the evidence of
work previously accomplished. Based on a field study this article introduces
the concept of stigmergy to the analysis of coordinative practices in the
building process. It distinguishes between practices of stigmergy, articulation
work and awareness practices. Stigmergy is understood as coordination achieved
by acting directly on the evidence of work previously accomplished by others.
The article provides descriptions of stigmergy in the building process i.e. in
design as well as construction work. It seeks to (1) introduce the concept of
stigmergy to CSCW, (2) to delimit this concept in regard to other concepts of
coordination such as articulation work and awareness and (3) to provide
descriptions of practices of stigmergy in the building process and, in this
capacity, to help explain how complex large-scale cooperative work is
coordinated. Keywords: coordination; building process; stigmergy; articulation work; awareness | |||
| Latent Users in an Online User-Generated Content Community | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 21-50 | |
| Alcides Velasquez; Rick Wash; Cliff Lampe; Tor Bjornrud | |||
| Online communities depend on the persistent contributions of heterogeneous
users with diverse motivations and ways of participating. As these online
communities exist over time, it is possible that users change the way in which
they contribute to the site. Through interviews with 31 long-term members of a
user-generated content community who have decreased their participation on the
site, we examined the meaning that these users gave to their contribution and
how their new participation patterns related to their initial motivations. We
complement the reader-to-leader framework (Preece and Shneiderman: AIS
Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 13-32, 2009) by
propounding the concept of latent user to understand decreasing content
contribution and user life-cycles in online communities. We showed that even
though latent users decrease their content contribution, their participation
becomes more selective and remained consistent with initial motivations to
participate. Keywords: content contribution in online communities; motivations to contribute;
latent users; online communities; online participation; reader-to-leader
framework | |||
| Big Board: Teleconferencing Over Maps for Shared Situational Awareness | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 51-74 | |
| Jefferson Heard; Sidharth Thakur; Jessica Losego; Ken Galluppi | |||
| Collaborative technologies for information sharing are an invaluable
resource for emergency managers to respond to and manage highly dynamic events
such as natural disasters and other emergencies. However, many standard
collaboration tools can be limited either because they provide passive
presentation and dissemination of information, or because they are targeted
towards highly specific usage scenarios that require considerable training to
use the tools. We present a real-time gather and share system called "Big
Board" which facilitates collaboration over maps. The Big Board is an
open-source, web based, real time visual collaborative environment that runs on
all modern web browsers and uses open-source web standards developed by the
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and WorldWideWeb Consortium (W3C). An
evaluation of Big Board was conducted by school representatives in North
Carolina for use in situational understanding for school closure decisions
during winter weather events. The decision to close schools has major societal
impacts and is one that is usually made based on how well a teenage driver
could handle wintry precipitation on a road. Collecting information on the
conditions of roads is especially critical, however gathering and sharing of
this information within a county can be difficult. Participants in the study
found the Big Board intuitive and useful for sharing real time information,
such as road conditions and temperatures, leading up to and during a winter
storm scenario. We have adapted the Big Board to manage risks and hazards
during other types of emergencies such as tropical storm conditions. Keywords: geospatial collaboration; web teleconferencing; information management; open
source tool; emergency management; situation awareness | |||
| Boundary-Object Trimming: On the Invisibility of Medical Secretaries' Care of Records in Healthcare Infrastructures | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 75-110 | |
| Claus Bossen; Lotte Groth Jensen; Flemming Witt Udsen | |||
| As health care IT gradually develops from being stand-alone systems towards
integrated infrastructures, the work of various groups, occupations and units
is likely to become more tightly integrated and dependent upon each other.
Hitherto, the focus within health care has been upon the two most prominent
professions, physicians and nurses, but most likely other non-clinical
occupations will become relevant for the design and implementation of health
care IT. In this paper, we describe the cooperative work of medical secretaries
at two hospital departments, based on a study evaluating a comprehensive
electronic health record (EHR) shortly after implementation. The subset of data
on medical secretaries includes observation (11 hours), interviews (three
individual and one group) and survey data (31 of 250 respondents were medical
secretaries). We depict medical secretaries' core task as to take care of
patient records by ensuring that information is complete, up to date, and
correctly coded, while they also carry out information gatekeeping and
articulation work. The importance of these tasks to the departments' work
arrangements was highlighted by the EHR implementation, which also coupled the
work of medical secretaries more tightly to that of other staff, and led to
task drift among professions. Medical secretaries have been relatively
invisible to health informatics and CSCW, and we propose the term
'boundary-object trimming' to foreground and conceptualize one core
characteristic of their work: maintenance and optimization of the EHR as a
boundary object. Finally, we reflect upon the hitherto relative invisibility of
medical secretaries which may be related to issues of gender and power. Keywords: boundary objects; cooperative work; electronic health records; gender;
health care; medical secretaries; invisible work; non-clinical occupations | |||
| "Heritage and Social Media. Understanding Heritage in a Participatory Culture," edited by Elisa Giaccardi | | BIBA | Full-Text | Publisher Page | 111-114 | |
| Dirk vom Lehn | |||
| With Heritage and Social Media. Understanding Heritage in a Participatory Culture Elisa Giaccardi has produced an edited volume that contributes to the existing body of studies concerned with museum and heritage sites presented in this journal and at CSCW and CHI conferences. The articles in the book focus on the production, management and exhibition of heritage, both by 'conventional' modern institutions such as museums, and by people in their day-to-day technology-enhanced activities. Its overall thesis is that the increasing pervasiveness of social media confronts organisations and institutions with opportunities for renewing themselves and with challenges that put at risk their very existence. | |||
| "Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method", by Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce & T. L. Taylor | | BIBA | Full-Text | Publisher Page | 115-118 | |
| Jeni Paay | |||
| A first very positive quality of this book is that it exactly delivers what it promises to be -- a handbook of method about ethnography and virtual worlds -- and does so in an accessible and enjoyable way. The form factor of the publication, as a handbook sized artefact, has been achieved, and so has the authors' objective that readers should be able to use it to guide ethnographic methods for the study of virtual worlds -- both when the reader is considering ethnography as a possible method for exploring the culture of a virtual world and when they are immersed in the actual study of one. The back cover of this book states that it is a practical guide for students, teachers, designers and scholars interested in using ethnographic methods for studying virtual worlds. I can confirm this to be the case, as I myself take on all of these roles in my professional life, and can see how this book could be a useful guide for the intended stakeholders. | |||
| Work Practices, Nomadicity and the Mediational Role of Technology | | BIB | Full-Text | 119-136 | |
| Luigina Ciolfi; Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho | |||
| Understanding Constellations of Technologies in Use in a Collaborative Nomadic Setting | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 137-161 | |
| Chiara Rossitto; Cristian Bogdan; Kerstin Severinson-Eklundh | |||
| This paper describes how people make sense of and use constellations of
technologies in a nomadic setting, and it illustrates how maintaining and
orchestrating a variety of applications and devices becomes an essential part
of nomadic practices. The data were collected over a period of 3 years at a
technical university by means of two field studies. Particular attention is
drawn to how the situated orchestration of devices and applications within a
group's constellation reflects university students' concern to manage their
projects at a number of locations, as well as issues of time and circulation of
resources. The analysis brings into focus how constellations of technologies
emerge and dissolve within collaborative ensembles that only exist for the
duration of a project, and how this can cause appropriation issues within
groups. Keywords: collaboration; nomadicity; place; constellation of technologies; field
studies | |||
| Nomadicity and the Care of Place -- on the Aesthetic and Affective Organization of Space in Freelance Creative Work | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 163-183 | |
| Michael Liegl | |||
| While information and communication technology enables freelancers to work
"anytime anywhere", it has become apparent that not all places seem to be
equally suitable for their work. Drawing from CSCW literature on the practical
accomplishment of mobile work and theoretical literature on creativity,
insights from ethnographic studies in New York, Berlin and Wiesbaden are
discussed. The paper follows workers in their everyday attempts to seek out and
enact work environments, which enable them to be creative and productive. In
these processes, mobility features both as a problem and a resource. The search
for the right place makes these workers restless, but sometimes restlessness
and nomadicity can inspire creativity. Similarly, new mobile, social and
collaborative technologies allow a new balancing of solitude and sociality. I
call this emerging nexus of practices which entails aesthetic, affective,
social and socio-political dimensions the care of place. A conjoint theoretical
and empirical analysis aims to draw attention to everyday lived practices of
nomadicity and the care of place in a wider discursive and socio-political
context to inform CSCW design. Keywords: care (of place); creativity; dispositif of mobility; nomadicity; place;
sociability; sociology of work; space | |||
| Officing: Mediating Time and the Professional Self in the Support of Nomadic Work | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 185-204 | |
| Justine Humphry | |||
| Today's mobile knowledge professionals use a diversity of digital
technologies to perform their work. Much of this daily technology consumption
involves a variety of activities of articulation, negotiation and repair to
support their work as well as their nomadic practices. This article argues that
these activities mediate and structure social relations, going beyond the usual
attention given to this work as a support requirement of cooperative and mobile
work. Drawing on cultural approaches to technology consumption, the article
introduces the concept of 'officing' and its three main categories of
connecting, configuring and synchronizing, to show how these activities shape
and are shaped by the relationship that workers have with their time and sense
of professional self. This argument is made through research of professionals
at a municipal council in Sydney and at a global telecommunications firm with
regional headquarters in Melbourne, trialling a smartphone prototype. This
research found that while officing fuels a sense of persistent time pressure
and collapse of work and life boundaries, it also supports new temporal and
spatial senses and opportunities for maintaining professional identities. Keywords: officing; 'anywhere, anytime'; nomadic practices; infrastructure support;
time pressure; professional identity | |||
| Nomadic Work as Life-Story Plot | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 205-221 | |
| Barbara Czarniawska | |||
| Interviews aimed at a reconstruction of working-life stories of 'digital
immigrants' and 'digital natives' revealed, unsurprisingly, that such stories
are emplotted with the aid of existing repertoires. What is more surprising,
though, is the fact that 'nomadic plots' can be borrowed from opposite
political repertoires, and that they cease serving as effective interpretative
templates in the face of changing circumstances, such as the financial crisis.
A focus group consisting of alleged self-described nomads indicated that the
choice of this life plot is related to such matters as family circumstances and
political situations during early childhood, as well as a present
gender-mitigated family situation. Other studies focusing on the younger
generation reveal that nomadic work as a life story plot does not lose its
attraction. Narrative analysis suggests, however, that the notions of 'digital
immigrants' and 'nomadic work' are more complex than their use in the media may
suggest. Keywords: Nomadic work; Mobile workers; Nomadic computing; Life stories; Emplotment | |||
| Nomadic Work: Romance and Reality. A Response to Barbara Czarniawska's 'Nomadic Work as Life-Story Plot' | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 223-238 | |
| Monika Büscher | |||
| This article takes departure in Barbara Czarniawska's discussion of 'Nomadic
Work as Life-Story Plot'. It contextualises her analysis of actors'
interpretations of nomadic work with a bi-focal review of the ambiguous
realities of these phenomena. Firstly, an examination of key aspects of the
socio-economic and political context of nomadic work in global neoliberal
economies reveals precarious conditions that cloud romantic interpretations of
nomadicity. Secondly, a review of studies of everyday practices of nomadic work
shows how neoliberal, but also alternative futures are enacted through creative
appropriation of collaborative technologies. One example is the work of digital
'disaster deck' volunteers and its potential for the mobilization of 'rapid,
highly localized assistance' through closer collaboration between a distributed
crowd, local communities, and official emergency responders (Starbird and Palen
2013). This and other examples suggest emergent new practices and politics of
dwelling in mobility that are focused on sociality and collaboration,
straddling virtual and physical commons. The twin critique developed in this
response can augment narrative analysis to inform more integrated CSCW
innovation that challenges the 'brave new world of work'. Keywords: CSCW; design; neoliberalism; nomadic work; commons | |||
| "Enterprise Mobility: Tiny Technology with Global Impact on Work," by Carsten Sørensen | | BIBA | Full-Text | Publisher Page | 239-243 | |
| Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho | |||
| Exploring issues surrounding the use of computer technologies in work settings and their impact upon work practices has been a central tenet of CSCW research since its very beginning. The topic of this book, enterprise mobility, is therefore of interest to the field, for it includes the use of mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs) for mobile work practices and related issues. Carsten Sørensen's "Enterprise Mobility" is a comprehensive introduction to the subject intended both to guide those first approaching it and to raise questions that might be further explored in contribution to the field for more knowledgeable readers. | |||
| The Day-to-Day Co-Production of Ageing in Place | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 245-267 | |
| Rob Procter; Trisha Greenhalgh; Joe Wherton; Paul Sugarhood; Mark Rouncefield; Sue Hinder | |||
| We report findings from a study that set out to explore the experience of
older people living with assisted living technologies and care services. We
find that successful 'ageing in place' is socially and collaboratively
accomplished -- 'co-produced' -- day-to-day by the efforts of older people, and
their formal and informal networks of carers (e.g. family, friends,
neighbours). First, we reveal how 'bricolage' allows care recipients and family
members to customise assisted living technologies to individual needs. We argue
that making customisation easier through better design must be part of making
assisted living technologies 'work'. Second, we draw attention to the
importance of formal and informal carers establishing and maintaining mutual
awareness of the older person's circumstances day-to-day so they can act in a
concerted and coordinated way when problems arise. Unfortunately, neither the
design of most current assisted living technologies, nor the ways care services
are typically configured, acknowledges these realities of ageing in place. We
conclude that rather than more 'advanced' technologies, the success of ageing
in place programmes will depend on effortful alignments in the technical,
organisational and social configuration of support. Keywords: bricolage; co-production; assisted living; ageing in place; telecare;
telehealth | |||
| Sensework | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 269-298 | |
| Torgeir K. Haavik | |||
| This article explores the nature of sociotechnical work in safety-critical
operations as it unfolds in settings that are characterised by
multidisciplinary interpretative work in high-tech environments, where direct
access to the phenomena of interest is restricted and the dependence on sensor
data and model support is high. The type of work that is described in the
article -- labelled 'Integrated Operations' in the petroleum industry -- ahas
some characteristic features that it shares with many other work settings which
are becoming increasingly typical for managing complicated, sociotechnical work
in our times. Sensework denotes a type of sociotechnical work in
safety-critical operations where groups of professionals try to put together
pieces of information to create a coherent picture to give meaning to familiar
and unfamiliar situations. Although related to, sensework should not be
confused with sensemaking; sensework is described as both something more and
something less than sensemaking. Sensework is described as unfolding along
three axes: a cognitive axis, a strategic axis and an organisational axis.
Furthermore, through its fluctuation along these axes, sensework points towards
two different views of work: work as imagined and work as done.
Epistemologically, these dimensions may be understood as rationalist and
constructivist dimensions of safe operations. Future research on sensework will
hopefully challenge and develop both the empirical scope and the conceptual
descriptions in this paper. The delimitation to safety-critical work in this
article and the way in which sensework is conceptualised should not be seen as
categorical constraints; these are starting points, not end points. Keywords: Safety-critical operations; Sensework; Sociotechnical work; Work as
imagined; Work as done | |||
| Interactional Order and Constructed Ways of Seeing with Touchless Imaging Systems in Surgery | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 299-337 | |
| Kenton O'Hara; Gerardo Gonzalez; Graeme Penney; Abigail Sellen; Robert Corish; Helena Mentis; Andreas Varnavas; Antonio Criminisi; Mark Rouncefield; Neville Dastur; Tom Carrell | |||
| While surgical practices are increasingly reliant on a range of digital
imaging technologies, the ability for clinicians to interact and manipulate
these digital representations in the operating theatre using traditional touch
based interaction devices is constrained by the need to maintain sterility. To
overcome these concerns with sterility, a number of researchers are have been
developing ways of enabling interaction in the operating theatre using
touchless interaction techniques such as gesture and voice to allow clinicians
control of the systems. While there have been important technical strides in
the area, there has been little in the way of understanding the use of these
touchless systems in practice. With this in mind we present a touchless system
developed for use during vascular surgery. We deployed the system in the
endovascular suite of a large hospital for use in the context of real
procedures. We present findings from a study of the system in use focusing on
how, with touchless interaction, the visual resources were embedded and made
meaningful in the collaborative practices of surgery. In particular we discuss
the importance of direct and dynamic control of the images by the clinicians in
the context of talk and in the context of other artefact use as well as the
work performed by members of the clinical team to make themselves sensable by
the system. We discuss the broader implications of these findings for how we
think about the design, evaluation and use of these systems. Keywords: touchless interaction; operating theatre; sterility; collaborative practices
of surgery; gestural interaction; work practice | |||
| Crisis Informatics and Collaboration: A Brief Introduction | | BIBA | Full-Text | 339-345 | |
| Volkmar Pipek; Sophia B. Liu; Andruid Kerne | |||
| Crisis Informatics from a CSCW Point of ViewMajor crises and disasters, like the September 11th attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the Sendai earthquake, constitute a ripe domain for CSCW concerns, as they involve collaboration among individuals, organizations and society as a whole. CSCW issues arise across all phases of emergency management, from initial planning and preparedness, through the detection of a crisis event, and into the response, recovery and mitigation phases. In many crisis scenarios, the quality of the collaboration among governmental, professional, volunteer, and citizen responders in crisis management greatly affects the impact on loss of lives and property. | |||
| Information and Expertise Sharing in Inter-Organizational Crisis Management | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 347-387 | |
| Benedikt Ley; Thomas Ludwig; Volkmar Pipek; Dave Randall; Christian Reuter; Torben Wiedenhoefer | |||
| Emergency or crisis management, as is well-attested, is a complex management
problem. A variety of agencies need to collaborate and coordinate in real-time
and with an urgency that is not always present in other domains. It follows
that accurate information of varying kinds (e.g. geographical and weather
conditions; available skills and expertises; state-of-play; current
dispositions and deployments) needs to be made available in a timely fashion to
the organizations and individuals who need it. By definition, this information
will come from a number of sources both within and across organizations.
Large-scale events in particular necessitate collaboration with other
organizations. Of course, plans and processes exist to deal with such events
but the number of dynamically changing factors as well as the high number of
heterogeneous organizations and the high degree of interdependency involved
make it impossible to plan for all contingencies. A degree of ongoing
improvisation, which typically occurs by means of a variety of information and
expertise sharing practices, therefore becomes necessary. This, however, faces
many challenges, such as different organizational cultures, distinct individual
and coordinative work practices and discrete information systems. Our work
entails an examination of the practices of information and expertise sharing,
and the obstacles to it, in inter-organizational crisis management. We conceive
of this as a design case study, such that we examine a problem area and its
scope; conduct detailed enquiries into practice in that area, and provide
design recommendations for implementation and evaluation. First, we will
present the results of an empirical study of collaboration practices between
organizations and public authorities with security responsibilities such as the
police, fire departments, public administration and electricity network
operators, mainly in scenarios of medium to large power outages in Germany.
Based on these results, we will describe a concept, which was designed,
implemented and evaluated as a system prototype, in two iterations. While the
first iteration focuses on situation assessment, the second iteration also
includes inter-organizational collaboration functionalities. Based on the
findings of our evaluations with practitioners, we will discuss how to support
collaboration with a particular focus on information and expertise sharing. Keywords: Information management; Expertise sharing; Collaboration; Design case study;
Inter-organizational crisis management; CSCW | |||
| Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework: Designing Strategic Configurations of Crowdsourcing for the Emergency Management Domain | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 389-443 | |
| Sophia B. Liu | |||
| Crowdsourcing is not a new practice but it is a concept that has gained
substantial attention during recent disasters. Drawing from previous work in
the crisis informatics, disaster sociology, and computer-supported cooperative
work (CSCW) literature, this paper first explains recent conceptualizations of
crowdsourcing and how crowdsourcing is a way of leveraging disaster
convergence. The CSCW concept of "articulation work" is introduced as an
interpretive frame for extracting the salient dimensions of "crisis
crowdsourcing." Then, a series of vignettes are presented to illustrate the
evolution of crisis crowdsourcing that spontaneously emerged after the 2010
Haiti earthquake and evolved to more established forms of public engagement
during crises. The best practices extracted from the vignettes clarified the
efforts to formalize crisis crowdsourcing through the development of innovative
interfaces designed to support the articulation work needed to facilitate
spontaneous volunteer efforts. Extracting these best practices led to the
development of a conceptual framework that unpacks the key dimensions of crisis
crowdsourcing. The Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework is a systematic,
problem-driven approach to determining the why, who, what, when, where, and how
aspects of a crowdsourcing system. The framework also draws attention to the
social, technological, organizational, and policy (STOP) interfaces that need
to be designed to manage the articulation work involved with reducing the
complexity of coordinating across these key dimensions. An example of how to
apply the framework to design a crowdsourcing system is offered with a
discussion on the implications for applying this framework as well as the
limitations of this framework. Innovation is occurring at the social,
technological, organizational, and policy interfaces enabling crowdsourcing to
be operationalized and integrated into official products and services. Keywords: Articulation work; Conceptual framework; Crisis informatics; Crisis mapping;
Crowdsourcing; Crowdwork; Digital volunteers; Disasters; Emergency management;
Human computation; Information management; Social media | |||
| Journalists as Crowdsourcerers: Responding to Crisis by Reporting with a Crowd | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 445-481 | |
| Dharma Dailey; Kate Starbird | |||
| Widespread adoption of new information communication technologies (ICTs) is
disrupting traditional models of news production and distribution. In this
rapidly changing media landscape, the role of the journalist is evolving. Our
research examines how professional journalists within a rural community
impacted by Hurricane Irene successfully negotiated a new role for themselves,
transforming their journalistic practice to serve in a new capacity as leaders
of an online volunteer community. We describe an emergent organization of media
professionals, citizen journalists, online volunteers, and collaborating
journalistic institutions that provided real-time event coverage. In this rural
context, where communications infrastructure is relatively uneven, this ad hoc
effort bridged gaps in ICT infrastructure to unite its audience. In this paper,
we introduce a new perspective for characterizing these information-sharing
activities: the "human powered mesh network" extends the concept of a mesh
network to include human actors in the movement of information. Our analysis
shows how journalists played a key role in this network, and facilitated the
movement of information to those who needed it. These findings also note a
contrast between how HCI researchers are designing crowdsourcing platforms for
news production and how crowdsourcing efforts are forming during disaster
events, suggesting an alternative approach to designing for emergent
collaborations in this context. Keywords: crisis informatics; crowdsourcing; crowd work; digital volunteerism; online
communities; open journalism; participatory journalism; social computing;
social media; infrastructure | |||
| Good Enough is Good Enough: Overcoming Disaster Response Organizations' Slow Social Media Data Adoption | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 483-512 | |
| Andrea H. Tapia; Kathleen Moore | |||
| Organizations that respond to disasters hold unreasonable standards for data
arising from technology-enabled citizen contributions. This has strong negative
potential for the ability of these responding organizations to incorporate
these data into appropriate decision points. We argue that the landscape of the
use of social media data in crisis response is varied, with pockets of use and
acceptance among organizations. In this paper we present findings from
interviews conducted with representatives from large international disaster
response organizations concerning their use of social media data in crisis
response. We found that emergency responders already operate with less than
reliable, or "good enough," information in offline practice, and that social
media data are useful to responders, but only in specific crisis situations.
Also, responders do use social media, but only within their known community and
extended network. This shows that trust first begins with people and not data.
Lastly, we demonstrate the barriers used by responding organizations have gone
beyond discussions of trustworthiness and data quality to that of more
operational issues. Keywords: humanitarian; relief; NGO; disaster; crowdsourcing; trust | |||
| Identifying Seekers and Suppliers in Social Media Communities to Support Crisis Coordination | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 513-545 | |
| Hemant Purohit; Andrew Hampton; Shreyansh Bhatt; Valerie L. Shalin; Amit P. Sheth; John M. Flach | |||
| Effective crisis management has long relied on both the formal and informal
response communities. Social media platforms such as Twitter increase the
participation of the informal response community in crisis response. Yet,
challenges remain in realizing the formal and informal response communities as
a cooperative work system. We demonstrate a supportive technology that
recognizes the existing capabilities of the informal response community to
identify needs (seeker behavior) and provide resources (supplier behavior),
using their own terminology. To facilitate awareness and the articulation of
work in the formal response community, we present a technology that can bridge
the differences in terminology and understanding of the task between the formal
and informal response communities. This technology includes our previous work
using domain-independent features of conversation to identify indications of
coordination within the informal response community. In addition, it includes a
domain-dependent analysis of message content (drawing from the ontology of the
formal response community and patterns of language usage concerning the
transfer of property) to annotate social media messages. The resulting
repository of annotated messages is accessible through our social media
analysis tool, Twitris. It allows recipients in the formal response community
to sort on resource needs and availability along various dimensions including
geography and time. Thus, computation indexes the original social media content
and enables complex querying to identify contents, players, and locations.
Evaluation of the computed annotations for seeker-supplier behavior with human
judgment shows fair to moderate agreement. In addition to the potential
benefits to the formal emergency response community regarding awareness of the
observations and activities of the informal response community, the analysis
serves as a point of reference for evaluating more computationally intensive
efforts and characterizing the patterns of language behavior during a crisis. Keywords: coordination; crisis informatics; cooperative crisis response; crisis
response coordination; organizational sensemaking; psycholinguistics;
spatio-temporal analysis; twitris; seeker-supplier behavior; semantic web | |||
| Information Sharing Among Disaster Responders -- An Interactive Spreadsheet-Based Collaboration Approach | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 547-583 | |
| Athula Ginige; Luca Paolino; Marco Romano; Monica Sebillo; Genoveffa Tortora; Giuliana Vitiello | |||
| Recent natural disasters have led crisis management organizations to revise
their protocols so as to rely on the contribution of a wider range of actors,
including simple citizens as well as expert operators, to support decision
making activities. Reliable and timely information sharing among members of
distributed teams of disaster responders has become paramount for the success
of the overall crisis management process. In this paper we propose a crisis
management system based on spreadsheet-mediated collaboration among on-site
responders and decision makers. To share data a common spreadsheet artifact has
been developed by using a participatory design approach which is accessed
through mobile user interfaces. The evaluation results showed that the use of
the spreadsheet artifact has resulted in more effective decision making
relating to set of earthquake management scenarios in high-risk areas located
in Italy. Keywords: Computer-supported collaborative work; Participatory design; Mobile
interfaces | |||