Abstract
Emergency situations often require cross-organisational response and planning by groups that are geographically distant from one another. Increasingly, individuals and these groups are leveraging technology to support a variety of communication and decision-making needs. This is creating an opportunity for groups, who traditionally worked in face-to-face environments, to accomplish these same tasks remotely using electronic communications resulting in new group dynamics. These groups, known as partially distributed emergency teams (PDETs), are managing crises, working together as a team of geographically dispersed collocated groups. This forms a flatter organisation which supports greater collaboration. Technology can be used to support creative ways that replace and enhance the gaps that are left from the transition of a F2F environment to a virtual one. There are underexplored methods that can be further developed to support virtual communities of practice communication and decision-making needs. We identify these gaps and suggest strategies to help build and nurture these communities. We conclude the chapter by describing the strength of online citizen participation and describe how using a global population can change the way some decision- making efforts can be enabled and enhanced.
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Plotnick, L., Turoff, M., White, C. (2011). Partially Distributed Emergency Teams: Considerations of Decision Support for Virtual Communities of Practice. In: Burstein, F., Brézillon, P., Zaslavsky, A. (eds) Supporting Real Time Decision-Making. Annals of Information Systems, vol 13. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7406-8_10
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