Edgar Maldonado

Collaborative systems development in disaster relief: The impact of multi-level governance

Disaster management information systems for international humanitarian relief are developed in contexts involving local, national and inter-governmental organizations together with local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). While the multi-organizational nature of disaster response is known to create challenges for information systems development, to date, less attention has been paid to their multi-level nature. This research sheds light on the implications of multi-level governance for disaster information systems development by integrating political science and information systems theories of multi-level governance. The integrated theoretical framework is then used to analyze a case study of a system development effort undertaken by a multi-organizational coordination body consisting of the headquarters of six large, international humanitarian relief agencies, together with their country offices in a Central American country. This research finds that multi-level governance can both negatively and positively influence information systems development. In a multi-level governance arrangement, authority for a systems development project may be diffuse and may change. The transfer of resources from higher to lower levels is key factor, as these resources help local organizations overcome resource constraints to collaboration. The initial outcome of coercion by higher levels of authority may be resistance, however over time the outcome can change to compliance.

Exploring Barriers to Coordination between Humanitarian NGOs: A Comparative Case Study of two NGO's Information Technology Coordination Bodies

Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations NGOs are increasingly collaborating through inter-organizational structures such as coalitions, alliances, partnerships, and coordination bodies. NGOs information technology coordination bodies are groups of NGOs aimed at improving the efficiency of ICT use in humanitarian assistance through greater coordination. Despite their popularity, little is known about these coordination bodies, specifically the extent to which they address inter-organizational coordination problems. This paper examines coordination problems within two humanitarian NGOs information technology coordination bodies. Based on data collected through interviews, observation, and document analysis, despite positive attitudes toward coordination by members, seven of eight widely accepted barriers to coordination still exist among members of these coordination bodies. Further, in a comparison of mandate-oriented, structural and behavioral coordination barriers, research finds mandate issues were most significant and structural factors were found in the greatest numbers. Findings suggest that effective humanitarian NGOs information technology coordination bodies must pay attention to both organizational design and management issues, although the former are likely to have a greater impact on coordination.

ICT Policies as a Means to Inhibit Social Exclusion: The South African Case

Social exclusion is a multi dimensional phenomenon that manifests itself in the exclusion of an individual from one or more of the four following activities: production of goods and services, consumption, civil engagement, and social interaction. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been argued to have the potential to reduce these forms of social exclusion. However, the extent to which they deal with these different forms of social exclusion remains unknown. Therefore, in this study we examine how ICT policies in South Africa are being employed to reduce social exclusion. In particular, we analyze which dimensions of social exclusion are targeted in telecommunication laws and one of the ICT initiatives of the South African government, Multi-Purpose Community Centers (MPCCs). Using a framework that portrays the four forms of social exclusion within the discourses used in phenomenon debates (redistributionist, moral underclass, and social integrationist) for analysis, we find that ICT policies in South Africa address two of the four forms of social exclusion: production of goods and services and civil engagement, spanning both the redistributionist and social integrationist discourses of social exclusion.

Coordinating humanitarian information: The problem of organizational and technical trajectories

Purpose – This paper seeks to examine two humanitarian information coordination bodies. The goals of both coordination bodies are the same, to find mechanisms for multiple organizations, engaged in humanitarian relief, to coordinate efforts around information technology and management. Despite the similarity in goals, each coordination body has taken a different path, one toward defining the problem and solution in a more technical sense and the other as defining the problem and solution as more organizational in nature.Design/methodology/approach – The paper develops case studies of two coordinating bodies using qualitative methodologies.Findings – The data suggest that coordination bodies which pursue problems requiring low levels of organizational change are more likely to have visible successes. Coordination bodies that pursue a more challenging agenda, one that aims for information management or management of information technology in ways that require organizational change, are likely to face greate...

Just Keep Tweeting: Emergency Responder's Social Media Use Before and During Emergencies

This study investigates how emergency response organizations use social media during emergency preparedness and response. Using qualitative (interviews and documents) and quantitative (Facebook posts) data, the study identifies several uses of social media in emergency preparedness and emergency management, as well as the organizational context that affects this use. Findings indicate that social media support various purposes of use, including information dissemination, obtaining input from the public and other organizations, and participation by other emergency response organizations. Branding of the organization during the emergency preparedness phase was found to be an important aspect of information dissemination, and helps social media to be useful tool to connect with the public and other organizations during the emergency response phase. Nevertheless, social media use in the emergency response domain still has to overcome leadership and staff adoption barriers.

Didn’t roger that: Social media message complexity and situational awareness of emergency responders

Abstract This study investigates the role of social media in situational awareness in the emergency response domain. It builds a theoretical model to that effect, the first such effort to the best of our knowledge, and empirically investigates one of the components of the model, text complexity. The empirical analysis was performed on a dataset of 999,243 messages from 997 Facebook pages of US police departments in 2009—2016. Messages were classified into four categories based on their utilitarian or hedonic nature: emergency preparedness, emergency response, post-emergency and user engagement. Three measures of complexity were used, each capturing different aspects of text. Contrary to the hypothesis formulated in the study, messages in the post-emergency and the emergency response categories were found to be the most complex. With text complexity on social media being an underexplored area, these results suggest a need for an explicit study of the link between social media messages and situational awareness, and indicate a need for practitioners to revisit social media practices.

Humanitarian information exchange network: why do international humanitarian organisations collaborate?

While in recent years research has highlighted the rise of inter-organisational collaboration among organisations in the non-profit sector and has documented issues related to forming and maintaining of these relationships, there is little known about inter-organisational humanitarian information exchange and especially the motives of collaboration. In this paper, we examine collaboration relationships among organisations member of a community of interest in humanitarian information exchange. We use the social network block-model method to analyse collaboration network data collected from 35 international organisations. Six strongly connected clusters are identified in the community. Evaluating reported reasons for these collaborations, we find that the two main motivations are related to relational characteristics of organisations, which interestingly are the most and least reported reasons in two of the most densely connected clusters of relationships. These findings are discussed through the lenses of ...

Identifying emergency stages in facebook posts of police departments with convolutional and recurrent neural networks and support vector machines

Classification of social media posts in emergency response is an important practical problem: accurate classification can help automate processing of such messages and help other responders and the public react to emergencies in a timely fashion. This research focused on classifying Facebook messages of US police departments. Randomly selected 5,000 messages were used to train classifiers that distinguished between four categories of messages: emergency preparedness, response and recovery, as well as general engagement messages. Features were represented with bag-of-words and word2vec, and models were constructed using support vector machines (SVMs) and convolutional (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The best performing classifier was an RNN with a custom-trained word2vec model to represent features, which achieved the F1 measure of 0.839.

NGO collaborations: sharing and pooling projects

Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly facing challenges due to the growing number of actors in the humanitarian relief sector as well as the high incidence of natural disasters. A prominent means of mitigating these challenges is through the mediation of inter-organizational structures such as collaboration bodies, which attempt to find mechanisms to coordinate information technology and information management (IT/IM). The intent of this paper is to understand the coordination mechanisms undertaken by collaboration bodies focused on IT/IM. The two prominent forms of initiatives used by collaboration bodies to achieve these ends are sharing and pooling projects. Sharing projects are those projects which seek resources from members within the collaboration body. Conversely, pooling projects look to procure resources from outside the confines of the collaboration body. This study utilizes a comparative case study approach to generate a set of propositions regarding the characteristics and implications of technological infrastructure based collaborations.

Analyzing Public Open Source Policy: The Case Study of Venezuela

This research examines public open source software (OSS) adoption policies using a framework built upon the analysis of information and communication technology (ICT) policies. The legislative and objective framework is used to picture the formal public OSS policies applied in Venezuela. Preliminary results indicate negligence for the inclusion of the private sector in the migration plan. Future research looks for an analysis in situ of the activities carried out in the country, and the validation of the framework.