Understanding distributed collaboration in emergency animal disease response

There is an increasing interest in CSCW systems for supporting emergency and crisis management. In this paper we explore work practices in emergency animal disease management focusing on the high-level analysis and decision making of the Australian Consultative Committee for Emergency Animal Disease (CCEAD) - a geographically distributed committee established to recommend action plans during animal disease outbreak. Our findings explore the ways in which they currently share and analyse information together, focusing in particular on their teleconferencing mediated meetings. Our findings highlight factors relating to the time pressure of the task, diverse configuration of the group and asymmetrical settings and how these influence the groups information sharing and communication. We use the findings to discuss implications for collaboration technologies that could support the group and broader implications for similarly structured work groups.