Crisis Management Resources

Finding Help When You Need It Most

Having a particular interest in Information Retrieval and more broadly in Information Management I have for some time been interested in how information is managed in crisis or disaster situations.  These are information management situations “on the edge” where, in the extreme,  getting it right can save lives.  They are also situations where relief workers and emergency services can be under significant cognitive overload and possibly subject to physical threat or environmental hardship.  Inevitably crisis and disaster situations involve many agencies, numerous volunteer groups, differing processes, multiple technologies and possibly several languages.  Furthermore technology, and in particular mobile communications, has now added to this mix the ability of citizens to receive and report information on an unprecedented scale.  Getting the information management right in these extreme situations is therefore immensely challenging.

Over the past few months I have used a bit of “cognitive surplus” to explore the multiplicity of policies and procedures, information providers, service providers and even some products that play a role in crisis and disaster management.  I have been stunned by the volume and diversity of what I found, and I’m sure I found only a fraction of what’s out there.  Finding your way around is a significant Information Retrieval task in itself as one source leads to another and there is no definitive listing.  As I discovered useful resources on the web I started to collect them using the Delicious bookmarking application.  Up until a couple of months back, sharing links on Delicious was an all or nothing affair.  However, they have recently released a functionality called “stacks” that enables you to make a sub-set of links available publicly. With a bit of help from the Delicious development team I therefore organised and published all my crisis and disaster management links.

In the stack, or rather stacks as I have now split it for performance and readability, are links for everyone whether they be policy makers, resource co-ordinators or first responders.  When a crisis or disaster happens those involved need to be able to find the right resources, fast.  Most planning and operational staffs will have well established contact details for resource providers but as every crisis or disaster is different, and therefore has different needs, rapid access to other resource contacts can be important.

To reach those who might find the stacks useful I tweeted on a couple of hashtags and also posted on the Emergency 2.0 Wiki and Crisis Response Journal groups on LinkedIn.  The response has been amazing. In the couple of months since publication the stacks have had over 450 hits. It appears that they are proving to be a valuable resource so I will continue to maintain the stacks and add links.

You can find my links here… - I hope you find them useful.