Making use of verbal communication

Verbal communication is fundamental in emergency response work and tends to increase in ambiguous situations (Dunn, Lewandowsky, and Kirsner, 2002). This means that how people talk and what they talk about says something about the situation they experience. In emergency response work, verbal communication is often seen as a problem and attempts have been made to further improve verbal communication technology (Camp et al., 2000). In large-scale disasters, we see how the restoration of the mobile phone networks is a prioritized activity due to their importance as an infrastructure for coordination between response organizations but also for the affected communities and their communication with the outside world. In Europe, significant investments have been made to establish dedicated national communication infrastructures based on the TETRA (terrestrial trunked radio) standard, allowing the police, fire brigade, paramedics, and other core response actors new means for secure and stable radio communication.

Despite the fundamental role of verbal communication technology in emergency and disaster response, there have been few attempts to provide new means to leverage the fact that verbal communication is now done in a digital format. One of the key problems with verbal communication in time-critical work is its ephemeral qualities, making it difficult for anyone to obtain the original content of a communication that has already occurred (Whittaker and Amento, 2003). One of the key functions of verbal communication in emergency response work is to provide situation reports and to communicate the ongoing actions of a particular actor. There is a risk that aspects of the information get lost, and it is also time-consuming to re-communicate information in a large network of actors. There is a need to transform verbal communication from an ephemeral state to a state of persistence in order to make information in such conversations digitally accessible. Studies of network technicians have shown that transformation of verbal communication into a persistent form decreased cognitive load and improved problem solving in dynamic situations (Rogers and Brignull, 2003) as well as the coordination of solving network failures (Whittaker and Amento, 2003). Here verbal communications were automatically transformed into text, enabling new possibilities of searching and sharing the content of the verbal communication.

Making use of verbal communication means in the most practical sense that the communication sequences are recorded, tagged (time, sender ID, receiver ID), stored as audio clips, and perhaps also transformed into text. Having large volumes of small fragments of verbal communication in a persistent state opens up for new ways of visualizing response work using a range of fresh perspectives. One could envision how these communication structures could become even more valuable than the content of the specific conversations. Making use of verbal communication will not only partially provide new ways to enforce accountability, but also provide means to structure the communication, and make it visible and accessible as part of the emergency response work. Collections of persistent verbal communication could be used to provide an evolving structure of communication that would correspond to, and make visible, the ongoing response work (see Figure 7.1).

These structures would allow new ways of making visible the work structure as a resource for sensemaking (Weick, 1995) as part of the ongoing response work. Visualized communication patterns would provide insights on which organizations have established contact, which roles seem to be core nodes, and if any organizations are missing in the ongoing response work. However, making use of verbal communication is not unproblematic due to its embedded consequences for privacy, responsibility, authority, and accountability. Few professional response organizations are ready for this type of openness and transparency. However, the future of emergency and disaster response will call for technology support that will embed similar or equivalent capabilities. A key challenge will be to explore the balance between the positive and negative effects with such hyper-transparency.

Making use of video communication

In everyday interactions we normally use different mediums for different types of communication. Each medium has its own characteristics, which will affect the effectiveness of the communication in different ways (Daft et al., 1987). A face-to-face discussion between two persons could be considered rich in content since the medium supports multi-modal communication, mainly consisting of talk and body language. Face-to-face also allows for quick reactions and responses. The discussion would not be as rich if the phone were used instead since the medium does not support translation of body language. E-mail would carry even less information. It is evident that different mediums have different characteristics; this is especially important to acknowledge when it comes to crisis and emergency response. The communication between the incident site and coordination centre most often consists of verbal discussion over radio and telephone. The communication between the actors is rich in information, most often rich enough to make well-grounded decisions on tactics and resource allocation. The remaining documented information from the communication may, however, not be as detailed. This creates problems related to backtracking and information handover. Stepping backwards in time often entails a rational line of facts, decisions, and events. However, this is probably not how the real event played out, and only a few people in the organization possess firsthand information about the situation. Leveraging video for documentation and communication could therefore improve how a current and a past event is comprehended as the information provided is contained in a rich and persistent format.

Video is currently used in many organizations, but the ways of using video vary. Almost all organizations leverage the streaming video feeds from news organizations during larger events; a growing number of organizations use video feeds generated by social media technologies to get instant and information rich situational updates. Some actors, especially law enforcement organizations, use CCTV technologies to either prevent crime or prove that a crime was committed (Tullio et al., 2010). A smaller number of early adopters in emergency and response organizations use video applications designed for their specific work practice (Bergstrand and Landgren, 2009). The major benefit is that the mobility and flexibility of such solutions are different compared to stationary CCTV camera systems. Using high-end mobile phones for video broadcasts provides new opportunities for communication and documentation in an information-rich and persistent format. The work conducted at command and coordination centres has long been based on a mental image of the situation, consisting of thoughts and notions about the event. New video technologies enable professional actors to get a better understanding of the event and place their view of the event in a more comprehensible form (Bergstrand and Landgren, 2009; Landgren and Bergstrand 2010).

The characteristics of videos are, however, not a suitable solution for all types of work practices and actors. An oft-portrayed problem with video use is that the details of a situation provided by the video make people shift their focus from a long-term to a short time perspective. Depending on the role and responsibility of the organization receiving the video, there is a risk of a negative effect of video use. As people are removed from the front lines of the event to take on a greater perspective, video may bring much of the detail back into the command centre and create a shift in focus. A major risk in this case is that the timescale shrinks, from planning for hours or days in advance, down to minutes. This has been a concern with early adopters of video technology in law enforcement and the fire brigade.

Another concern of video use is related to the sharing of video information. The content of video clips is not known in advance and this creates a risk of subjecting people to undesired material and legal problems. Laws and regulations on how video can be used in response work differs between countries and states, and what is legal in one state may be highly illegal in the next state. Since video is rich in information, everything from license plates, patient information, or any other kind of sensitive information could be included.

Broadcast video is a powerful medium capable of rich communication in a persistent format. As the mobile infrastructure and handheld devices constantly evolve to greater capacities, new opportunities to utilize mobile broadcast video will become available. Video is making its way into more and more professions, and it is only a matter of time before it becomes a standard procedure in documentation practices.

Making use of in-situ documentation

In times of emergency situations or disaster events, response organizations produce large amounts of information in order to provide appropriate responses. Computer-based dispatch systems keep track of response units and accident locations, and provide detailed log-data of where units are and how long they have been at a specific location. Such data is transformed to valuable information in post-incident analysis in order to provide detailed reports of how the organization used specific resources. However, there is a type of information that in most organizations is completely forgotten, both during a response as well as afterwards. Such information is here termed as in-situ documentation, characterized by its short lifespan, strong contextual dependency, and informal use. This information is produced by the members of a response organization and materialized as paper notes and whiteboard sketches. In-situ documentation is often put in the recycling bin or wiped off the whiteboard after it has served its purpose. However, in-situ documentation is important information when it comes to understanding not only what activities the organizations undertook during the response work, but, perhaps more importantly, why, and what assumptions formed these actions.

By focusing on making in-situ documentation less ephemeral and more persistent, such information will become a valuable resource both during response work and for a larger professional community in post-incident analysis. In-situ documentation is produced in social interactions between personnel in the organization or in interactions across organizational boundaries. People make notes when they talk to someone over the phone (O’Hara, Perry, Sellen, and Brown, 2001), when people meet for a quick situation briefing, or at the whiteboard when they discuss a particular topic or situation. This means that in-situ documentation is highly social. It is produced in a social setting and reflects key aspects of the specific social interaction. Significant challenges when developing new means of making use of in-situ documentation are its short lifespan, strong contextual dependency, and informal use. Keeping in mind that in-situ documentation tends to be materialized in non-digital formats is yet another challenge. A key aspect for all response organizations is to acknowledge that in-situ documentation is a resource that should be handled with the same professionalism as documentation produced as part of formal reporting activities. This means that in-situ documentation must be archived during the response work. There are a few different strategies that could be deployed in order to make in-situ documentation persistent and thereby extend its otherwise short lifespan. These strategies are to: a) improve existing paper-based work practice; b) augment existing paper-based work practice; and c) transform existing paper-based practice into digital work practice. Each strategy has its pros and cons.

Improving existing paper-based work practice is a strategy that could be a first step for organizations that continue to work with pens and paper by making digital copies of the in-situ documentation that is produced. A key artifact in this approach is the mobile phone’s digital camera. By making ‘photo-copies’ of the handwritten notes, and uploading the pictures to an information system, the paper-based notes could instantly be located on a time-line and assigned with a role-based metadata based on the caller-ID. This approach is far from perfect but can add important capabilities to an organization.

Augmenting existing paper-based work practice is a strategy that involves new digital artifacts, such as digital ink pens. There have been exploratory studies of such technology use in command and control centres (Khalilbeigi, Bradler, Schweizer, Probst, and Steimle, 2010). The approach means that the personnel continue to use pens and papers, but while using them a digital replica of the notes is automatically produced and stored. This means that the personnel continue to work with pen and paper but they gain detailed digital documentation without having to abandon fundamental artifacts in the existing paper-based work practice. However, switching to a digital ink pen infrastructure does not come without limitations. The personnel are required to use dedicated pens and often dedicated paper sheets.

Transforming existing paper-based practice into digital work practice is the most challenging strategy with its strong focus on abandoning the use of non-digital documentation artifacts. Here, the personnel are expected to make digital notes, digital whiteboard drawings, and only produce textual and graphical material using digital information technology. A major challenge in this strategy is to avoid the dependency of keyboard-centered input of information and instead open up to a variety of approaches to produce digital information. We currently see significant developments in new interaction techniques using multi-touch on mobile, handheld, and wall-sized displays (see e.g., Precision Information Environments, precisioninformation.org) which over time will change how in-situ documentation is produced. However, moving from a paper-based practice to a completely digital work practice is not just dependent on heavy investments in new artifacts but also requires a change in the underlying information systems to accommodate these new interaction modalities.

Whichever of the above strategies are deployed to extend the lifespan of in-situ documentation and make it persistent, there are still two challenges that must be addressed. Having a digital representation of in-situ documentation is just the first step; the second step is to make the documentation contextually relevant. Making documentation contextually relevant is related to a phenomenon that many have experienced, namely that paper notes and whiteboard drawings tend to fade from being insightful to meaningless over time. Further, reading someone else’s notes from a meeting or looking at a whiteboard drawing from a discussion you did not take part in is often confusing. The reason for this is that the notes are contextually embedded and for additional people they lack context. In order to balance this fact, people must be able to assign context to the digital documentation. In its simplest form, this could include the capability to add notes to the digital documentation object. Such notes should cover more than just date/time and creator, but also information about who was part of the social context when the documentation was produced, who contributed to it, and what the underlying discussion was about. By adding such capabilities, the documentation will become a social object that people can share, comment upon, and rate.

The third and last step is related to the social aspects of in-situ documentation. In the paper-based work practice, in-situ documentation is informal and personal with limited reach. What we envision is how there will be a change from a personal focus to a social focus. This means that new mechanisms must be developed in order to allow the producer of in-situ documentation to determine an appropriate reach. Such a reach should not only be based on a traditional role-based model, but also along temporal and spatial dimensions. One could here envision an approach where in-situ documentation has a wide reach in the moment it is created and then slowly degrades, with limitations on who could access the specific piece of information. When the situation is over and the response work has been terminated, the information is again opened up with extensive reach for post-incident analysis. So far we have seen very few attempts at treating information in emergency and disaster events as social objects with extensive reach. It is reasonable that the future of emergency and disaster response will call for new mechanisms in order to provide some form of dynamic transparency to meet new demands on accountability and professional review of the actions conducted in response work.

Collecting traces of action

Many of our interactions with the world leave digital traces. The traces are generated from events such as swiping a credit card to the communications between friends and colleagues in social media. Digital traces are also created in emergency events generated from the computer-based dispatch systems, the production of documentation, the communication, and also by public bystanders. All data generated during an event is valuable information in both post-incident analysis and in the ongoing work.

Information and traces for a specific incident can be gathered from a wide range of sources. Some sources may be internal, from partner organizations and public sources. Information takes on a wide range of formats, from spoken words down to detailed data from sensor infrastructures. Phone calls, internal documents, event logs, transactions in internal business information systems, and whiteboard drawings are all digital traces of actions (Landgren, 2006) that can be collected and used in a meaningful way. Resource utilization, available personnel, and many other indicators of an organization’s ongoing work can be collected and put into context. When looking into different organizations we often see vast amounts of data being generated, but only a small portion used in the practice. The general public and media also provide vast amounts of information, and citizens’ reporting through social media can be a valuable input to an emerging situation (Starbird et al., 2010).

A component for collecting traces of actions must therefore include a set of flexible adapters that could be used to extract specific information from the organization’s operational response information systems. Further, there must also be adapters that can extract information from public sources and social media infrastructures, such as Twitter and Flickr, without the need for traditional data integration techniques. Novel approaches for flexible collection of traces of actions must be developed to meet the demands of an ever increasing range of information sources, communication infrastructures, and social media platforms.

Structuring of data and information streams

As mentioned in the previous section, vast amounts of data are generated during a crisis or emergency situation. However, a structure needs to be applied to the information in order to create any sort of value. The lack of proper IT strategies often results in valuable information being scattered over several systems without the possibility of being connected. A proper systems architecture and an interconnected data structure is needed in order to access and query information extracted by collecting traces of the action component.

Information collected from other systems, such as Twitter tweets, cell phone call data, and Flickr photos, is of no or little use in the ongoing work if it only ends up on a server without anybody’s knowledge. There needs to be meta-information available to make a connection between the ongoing situation and the extracted material. Structuring the data also implies added possibilities of connecting different instances of information. All systems generate information that could present a richer operating picture when brought together. An example could be the use of data from an emergency call center, extracting the location of recent callers and combining it with areas affected by an ongoing power outage. This would also form a new baseline to identify areas where emergency calls are no longer working. By structuring the information, new connections can be made and specific organizational properties can be put into context. The greater challenge is to look at their own organization, all the different systems used, what type of information they produce, and how it can become better connected along new baselines.

A component is needed in the information systems architecture that enables the structuring of information from a range of different systems. Further, this central component should be able to provide access to fragments of information from multiple sources in order to provide a better common operating picture. Access to fragments from multiple systems implies that the component is able to impose a system-wide structure on the information generated during specific emergencies or crises.

Visualization and exploration

Data visualization enables new forms of information to be brought into the work environment. ‘The basic idea of visual data exploration is to present the data in a range of visual formats, allowing actors to gain deep insights from the data, elaborate and draw conclusions by directly interacting with the data’ (Keim, 2002). When visualizing information, we are able to draw new insights and make new connections between the information and an evolving situation. Information overload is also reduced since generalizations are used when presenting the data. The number of rescue units, for example, could be presented as representations on a map instead of using a traditional detailed spreadsheet view.

Information in response work has many different characteristics that affect how it can be visualized. Typical characteristics include temporal, spatial, ordinal, qualitative, quantitative, or a combination of any or all of the above. Together the pieces of information create a construct depicting a stationary or mobile object, place, process, action, or relation (Andrienko and Andrienko, 2006). Each specific type allows for the information to be used in different types of visualization. Crisis response and management, however, is different from many other fields where information visualization is used. The main difference is the temporal relation between the onset of the event (when information is created) and when it is used. The information used in VISTA (King, 2006) for visualizing information for both strategic and operational decision-making in humanitarian relief work is gathered over weeks, months, and years, while a small-scale incident or crisis is only active for hours or days. The major challenge for information visualization in crisis management is not primarily related to the tools and methods for visualization. The challenge is related to the ability to extract and structure data in order for it to be used in visualizations.

Information visualization is a key component since it brings the collected and structured information into context and makes it part of the work practice. Specific information content such as phone call metainformation, together with information about the caller, time, and the place of the call, forms a powerful set of data. By capturing and combining this type of multi-dimensional data, several types of visualizations can be created to explore the dynamics of a specific situation. Captured communications, in-situ documentation, location, and other forms of information and data can be combined into temporal geo-spatial ‘event streams’ depicting the unfolding of a situation as shown in Figure 7.2.

Collaborative problem-solving workspaces

Emergency and disaster response, by nature, is a truly collaborative activity, ranging from small-group collaboration to complex actor networks involving hundreds of different organizations. A common problem in any collaborative activity is coordination. According to Turoff et al. (2004), the coordination problem in emergency response has been largely ignored. One reason is related to the lack of technology support for people to dynamically form groups around an ongoing event, and by doing so allow a community of experts to interact and share insights across organizational boundaries. The main questions from a sense-making perspective in this activity are ‘What is the story?’ and ‘What do we do next?’ (Weick, 2005). However, due to the lack of technologies to support collaboration and coordination, the questions often change to ‘What do others know?’ and ‘What are they doing?’. A collaborative problem-solving space must include a rich set of services for communication and information exchange in order to support the dynamics of collaborating with other actors.

Collaborative problem-solving workspaces are therefore an important component to allow small, as well as large, groups to dynamically formulate problems, discuss topics, and prioritize activities (Turoff et al., 2004).

Such workspaces will not only allow formal and informal groups to share expertise but also provide transparency and allow different expertise on different levels or from different organizations to observe, review, and provide input on the activities that are ongoing. Collaborative technologies have evolved greatly during the Web 2.0 era. The key component of collaborative workspaces is based on a range of well-known functionalities typically found in mainstream tools for activities such as collaborative writing, project management, live rich communication, discussion forums, event planning, and voting.

Communication platform

Communicating with the public is a critical task in emergency and crisis response. Updated information about ongoing events, instructions on how to act, where to find more information, and other key aspects need to be communicated. There are currently multiple channels used for this type of communication, ranging from actor-specific websites to distribution via traditional media, and even specific early warning systems to inform, warn, and move people out of danger. A major concern is that the information provided to the public is often sporadic, delivered late and with vague content (Sutton, Palen, and Shklovski, 2008). Improved means to capture and structure data would make it possible to provide the public with up-to-date and rich information. The channels of communication need to be redesigned as the use of traditional media has greatly changed during the last decade. Many organizations have incorporated new channels, such as social media, into their information dissemination protocols; however, more work needs to be done. One could imagine that the use of social media channels will increase and in turn will not only require functionality to push information to the public, but will also allow new means for more continuous interaction between authorities and the public. An important trend has emerged where the public, as well as automated sensor systems, provide more and more information into emergency response information systems. Detailed witness reports and sensory data are today published in social media channels, and these have proven valuable in response work (Starbird et al., 2010).

Interactions over the phone or through joint meetings are still the most common methods of information exchange. New systems for information sharing are constantly being implemented. The main problem with many of these initiatives is that they lead to ‘yet another system’, requiring additional manual documentation practices. Professional communication needs to be supported in the work practice and not become a burden of new tasks and responsibilities. The communication platform should be designed to accommodate a range of communication channels and provided as an embedded component in the information environment.

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