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Government organizations responsible for emergency and crisis response today face challenges that did not exist ten years ago, when it was not uncommon that emergency and disaster response was colored by a significant lack of information. Today, there are still a majority of organizations that continue to experience a lack of information, despite recent developments in advanced information technology support. The rich use of mobile communication technology at a citizens’ level means, in theory, that any important piece of information is only one phone call away. The rapid adoption of social software has shown that almost any critical situation will result in a quake of information from a massive crowd of individuals (Sakaki, Okazaki, and Matsuo, 2010). This development presents completely new challenges in terms of information systems support. Many systems currently in use by crisis response authorities have not been developed with this new world of massive information streams in mind. Software solutions are still based on a message and reporting idea that only to a limited degree meets the well-known design principles (Turoff, Chumer, Van de Walle, and Yao, 2004) for emergency and crisis response information systems.
We argue that many information systems are in crisis, due to the lack of capacity to provide support in this new crisis information landscape. This chapter is an attempt to present and discuss what future information environments should include in order to provide new capabilities for improved shared situational awareness (Harrald and Jefferson, 2007) based on a wide range of information inputs, both from response actors and from the general public. For response actors, being able to make use of information from the public has been highlighted as an important aspect in studies of social media use in wild-fire events and school shootings (Hughes, Palen, Sutton, Liu, and Vieweg, 2008). Designing and developing system support in order to establish shared situational awareness and providing material for a common operating picture (Harrald and Jefferson, 2007) is a complex task, with several important challenges that need to be addressed. We will present and discuss these challenges by describing and discussing the possibilities and challenges of some of the key information resources in future information environments. We will thereafter present fundamental components necessary to consider when designing and developing these components in information environments for crisis and emergency response settings.
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