In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

For anyone interested in the role of technology in public disaster preparedness and response (and everyone in the field should be!), I highly recommend a new paper, “A Vision for Technology-Mediated Support for Public Participation & Assistance in Mass Emergencies & Disasters”.

It is co-authored by the University of Colorado/Boulder’s Leysia Palen (head of the school’s Crisis Informatics program which has been a leader in this area), Kenneth M. Anderson, James Martin, Douglas Sicker, Martha Palmer and Dirk Grunwald, and the University of California/Irvine’s Gloria Mark. The research is being done as part of the new Project EPIC: Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis established by faculty from both institutions.

The authors write that their aim is to: “present a vision of the future of emergency management that better supports inclusion of activities and information from members of the public during disasters and mass emergency events.” And the paper does a terrific job of doing so in a detailed but readable manner. It offers an excellent summary/analysis of information and technology (ICT) uses during previous emergencies and then lays out ideas and multidisciplinary research questions that should be studied and addressed in the future:

According to the paper, the objective of the “vision”:

…is that people find and share the information they need to make the best, most informed decisions possible during situations of emergency and high disruption—in other words, to support and enhance the analytical skills of members of the public. In our own work, we aim to do this through leveraging the knowledge of members of the public, and through reframing emergency response as a socially-distributed information system. This work will support people across a range of geographies (Powell, 1954), by which we broadly mean those who are inside the crisis zone as well as those on the outside who are compelled to help not only through supplying physical labor, goods and psychological support, but also by playing critical roles in information dissemination.

Through reuse of computer-mediated communications that are publicly available (such as those on community websites, personal blogs, public texting systems like Twitter, social networking sites, mapping sites, etc.), we aim to derive applications and services for use by the public that integrate those original communications with information that helps citizens assess context, validity, source, credibility, and timeliness to make the best decisions for their highly localized, changing conditions.

Such a vision of research, then, is guided by this question: How can publicly-available, grassroots, peer-generated information be deemed to be trustworthy, secure and accurate, so that it can be leveraged and aligned with official information sources for optimal, local decision-making by members of the public?

The full paper can be found here.