Crisis Informatics and Collaboration: A Brief Introduction

Major 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. Crisis Informatics takes an interdisciplinary perspective on the socio-technical, informational and collaborative aspects of developing and using technologies and information systems in the context of the full disaster lifecycle—preparedness, warning, impact, response, recovery, and mitigation phases. Crisis Informatics views emergency management as a socio-technical system, in which information is disseminated within and among official and public channels and entities. Research wrestles with methodological concerns as it strives to develop socially-and behaviorally-informed theories, policies, and development of information and communication technology (ICT). As the challenges of crisis management grow more complex from the increase in vulnerability to hazards of all types, the opportunities to collaborate using a rapidly growing set of ICTs and collaborative technologies (e.g., social networking platforms, mobile devices with integrated cameras, location-aware services, multi-touch surfaces, crowdsourcing systems, web-based systems) urge us to find new ways of understanding, conceptualizing and evaluating possible use cases for these collaborative technologies in emergency management and response. 'Collaborative resilience' strategies can help improve collaboration quality, but such strategies and the ICTs being developed and used in crisis situations need to be explored in terms of describing and exchanging best practices, designing appropriate