Inter-organizational crisis management infrastructures for electrical power breakdowns

Major electricity breakdowns like the Northeast Blackout (USA) in 2003 or the blackout in most parts of Western Europe in 2005, have shown the fundamental role of electricity in our everyday life. The experiences of these accidents show that power suppliers, firefighters, police, county administration and citizens face multifarious challenges in inter-organizational communication, information and coordination processes during coping and recovery work. In this work-in-progress paper we describe early research dealing with interorganizational issues in emergency management (EM). We are mainly focusing on supporting social practices in inter-organizational EM, for example collaborative interpretation of emergency situations, ad-hoc coordination or supporting citizen communication and helping routines. Identified from our experiences from related projects, discussions and literature studies, we suggest potential questions and future topics in user-driven software engineering processes for EM and domain specific problems, such as supporting citizen participation, coping with information uncertainties and quality variations or enhancing inter-organizational learning.

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