Call for Papers
6th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis
Response and Management (ISCRAM 2009)
May 10-13, 2009
Special Methodology Track on
ETHNOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT FOR CRISIS MANAGEMENT
Special Track Organisers:
Claudia Mueller, Volkmar Pipek, Volker Wulf (University of Siegen,
Germany)
Markus Klann (Fraunhofer-FIT, St. Augustin, Germany)
Deadline for paper submission: January 11, 2009
Submission types: Academic/Practitioner (see below)
Motivation
Depending on the extent of emergency situations the amount of actors
involved in crisis management increases gradually. In the
organisations involved, communication needs arise between various
actors and departments such as crisis management groups and different
operative staff groups on-site, all with different information needs,
information and communication cultures and views. In larger cases of
emergency such as infrastructure breakdowns (e.g. induced by storms,
floods etc.) which affect different organisations and organisational
forms (public and private) varying information needs and communication
and information cultures challenge inter-organisational cooperation
even stronger. Ethnographic approaches such as workplace studies have
proven to be very helpful in analyzing fine-grained information and
communication needs and in informing according user-centred systems
design. But in emergency response scenarios most task/activities are
incident-focussed, they happen spontaneously which makes it difficult
for ethnographers to capture them and for IT developers to evaluate
their concepts. In addition, systems design particularly for inter-
organisational crisis communication and management is still a big
challenge due to different information and communication needs,
practices and cultures.
Research Area
Big-scale infrastructure breakdowns may involve different
organisations and parties such as infrastructure providers (e.g.
electricity providers), local authorities, fire fighters, rescue
services and affected citizens. For researchers in the realm of
technology development for crisis communication and management support
there are many challenges to overcome: How do we deal on the
operational level with e.g. legal aspects of private-public
cooperation scenarios? How can ethnographic methods, such as e.g.
Participatory Design, (Business) Ethnography, help to consolidate the
varying information and communication needs, languages, cultures and
priorities? How can situatedness and spontaneity of work practices be
acknowledged sufficiently in these highly complex and dynamic
circumstances and be integrated in technology development approaches
such as End-user Development? How can ethnographic methods help to
investigate communication and information support in inter-
organisational cooperative contexts by means of ubiquitous
technologies? How can technology designers evaluate their concepts in
practice?
This special session aims at gathering methodological solutions for
ethnography and ethnographically-informed technology development, but
also related problems in investigating and technologically supporting
inter- and intra-organisational crisis communication and management.
Topics
Some non-exhaustive examples of topics that could contribute to this
session are
Ethnographic studies of inter- and intra-organisational crisis
communication and management
Studies of ubiquitous applications in inter-organisational crisis
communication and management and related development of ethnographic
methods such as living lab, user-modelling
Ethnographic and participative approaches which help consolidating
different cultures, views and priorities and bring them to successful
technology development, such as Participative Design or (Business)
Ethnography
Appropriate interplay of ethnographic methods and design approaches
to sufficiently acknowledge the situatedness in highly complex and
dynamic circumstances
Type of contribution:
We encourage both academics and practitioners to contribute to the
special session.
· Academic contribution: we invite researchers from academia or
research labs to present their research or research-in-progress
papers. Prospective presenters submit a regular research (or research-
in-progress) paper.
· Practitioner contribution: we invite practitioners to present
their practice or experiences in information systems development, use
or needs. Prospective presenters submit a short practitioner paper or
a Powerpoint presentation along with an abstract.
Important Notice:
All submissions must be formatted according to the ISCRAM 2009
formatting guidelines. Templates and instructions are published on www.iscram.org
.
All submissions must be submitted through the ISCRAM 2009
conference paper submission web page at www.conftool.com/iscram2009.
Instructions for the ConfTool system can be found on www.iscram.org.
All papers and presentations will go through a double-blind review
process, leading to a decision of (conditional) acceptance or rejection.
Accepted papers will be included in the ISCRAM 2009 program and
published in the official proceedings if and only if
(1) the paper is formatted according to the instructions,
(2) the authors sign the copyright transfer form and
(3) one of the authors registers for the conference and pays the
registration fee before the cut-off date for early registration.
Authors who have multiple papers accepted can only register for and
present one paper at the conference; co-authors need to register
separately.
--
Volkmar Pipek
Assistant Professor for 'CSCW in organisations'/FB 5
University of Siegen
Hoelderlinstr. 3
57068 Siegen
http://www.cscw.uni-siegen.de/
Tel.: +49 271 740 4068
Fax.: +49 271 740 3384
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