Users Needs for Collaborative Management in Emergency Information Systems

The management of an emergency is a cooperative work that involves people from different areas and different roles. In this paper, we describe an empirical study based on surveys and interviews that have been done with users to study how to improve the collaborative functionalities of an existing system used for cooperating and sharing resources among different Spanish Emergency Management governmental agencies. The goal of the study was to understand how emergency workers cooperate in real emergencies and the kind of tools they are actually using, as well as to identify potential strategies and technologies to improve the level of computer-supported collaboration.