Michael Chumer

Designing a group support system to review and practice emergency plans in virtual teams

In the 21st century, rapid changes in our society necessitate continuous review and practice of emergency plans. Traditional Face-to-Face (FtF) interactions in making emergency plans and training responders seem insufficient. The Virtual Team (VT), a new team form allowing a dynamic recruitment of experts from a global extent and a conduction of teamwork whenever it is needed, provides a more agile solution. This paper introduces a Group Support System (GSS) called Collaborative Scenario (Collario), aiming to facilitate effective collaboration in creating and discussing scenarios in VTs and to utilise scenarios as a vehicle in reviewing and practising emergency plans on a continuous basis. This research is still in progress. Three professionals have been involved in system demonstrations and interviews. Although it is still too early to make any conclusions, it is encouraging to know that all the three experts think that Collario is easy to use and might be useful for various Emergency Preparedness purposes.

Shareable Technology Mash-Up for Situation Awareness in Catastrophic Events

This paper offers a descriptive account of the use of a shareable mash-up of technologies designed to create situation awareness during catastrophic events. In particular, we focus on the exploratory use of technologies for information aggregation and sharing between public and private sector entities during a national emergency simulation--National Level Exercise 2011. The goal of this research is to seek a proper way to integrate ubiquitous technologies such as Twitter, Google Earth Map, and Person Finder to share situation updates as well as monitor resource allocation during response to a catastrophic event. We implement an emergent use of micro syntaxes on feeds from Twitter to facilitate coordination of efforts among responding agencies. This paper concludes with a discussion of several implications for design based on our findings that may be beneficial to crisis management as well as other domains.