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AbstractSocial media has been widely adopted for assisting the efforts in emergency response and recovery, but it has been underutilized for emergency planning purposes. Emergency planning in a local community context must leverage accessible and free resources such as social media, because it is largely a volunteer enterprise. We describe our fieldwork with local annual festival emergency planning teams that led to the design of the Community Incident Report (CIR). CIR is a novel emergency planning system that externalizes community knowledge on persisting issues and common mitigation strategies by integrating police reports, local crisis information, and social multimedia content to foster citizens' awareness of local emergency information and to assist emergency planners in planning for recurring and cyclical events. We provide a use case analysis of CIR and its evaluation with 20 local residents, and discuss how it could be extended to inform emergency planning for other community events and local municipalities that share similar characteristics.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- FOREWORD -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- Part I. Military Divisions, Departments, Districts, and Reconstruction Districts -- CHRONOLOGICAL EXHIBIT OF MILITARY COMMANDS -- HISTORY OF MILITARY COMMANDS -- Part II. States and Territories of the United States -- STATES AND TERRITORIES OF THE UNITED STATES, GIVING MILITARY DEPARTMENT OR DISTRICT IN WHICH EMBRACED -- Part III. List of Maps in the Military Atlas of the United States -- LIST OF MAPS IN THE MILITARY ATLAS OF THE UNITED STATES -- INDEX OF COMMANDS -- INDEX OF COMMANDERS -- ADDENDA -- NOTES BY FRANCIS B. HEITMAN -- MEMORANDUM -- INDEX OF NAMES

PurposeTimebanking is a generalized, voluntary service exchange that promotes use of otherwise idle resources in a community and facilitates community building. Participants offer and request services through the mediation of the timebank software. In timebanking, giving help and accepting help are both contributions; contributions are recognized and quantified through exchange of time-based currency. The purpose of this paper is to explore how users perceive timebank offers and requests differently and how they influence actual use.Design/methodology/approachThis survey study, conducted in over 120 timebanks across the USA, examines users' timebanking participation, adapting dimensions of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).FindingsThe authors found that perceived ease of use in timebanking platforms was positively associated with positive attitudes toward both requests and offers, whereas perceived usefulness was negatively associated with positive attitudes toward requests and offers. The authors also found that having positive attitudes toward requests was important to elicit behavioral intention to make a request, but that positive attitudes toward offers did not affect behavioral intentions to make offers.Practical implicationsThe authors discussed these results and proposed design suggestions for future service exchange tools to address the issues the authors raised.Originality/valueThe study is among the first few studies that examine timebanking participation using large-scale survey data. The authors evaluate sociotechnical factors of timebanking participation through adapting dimensions of TAM.

The field of community informatics focuses on how information and communication technology can contribute to the development and sustainability of local communities. The ubiquity of mobile technologies, coupled with their affordances of connecting people and accessing information anytime, anywhere, brings new opportunities for community informatics research. These same affordances also entrain new methodological challenges in capturing and understanding mobile technology use, as mobile-supported interactions can be difficult to study systematically. Such interactions are often situated in complex social and physical settings, such as the local community context. In response to these challenges, we describe the method for scripting events that participants enact within their community and through which we probe how mobile technology impacts community building and vice versa. With the scripted method, we emphasize the need to integrate multiple streams of data and analyses to triangulate and obtain a holistic picture of community interactions. This scripted method is designed to afford ecological validity in employing socially and behaviorally realistic activities, while maintaining some research control, in providing a standard scaffold for participants to enact target behaviors. We discuss how our method could be leveraged in other mobile media communication studies involved in complex social and physical contexts.

11 pages, 4 figures. ; Response to large-scale emergencies is a cooperative process that requires the active and coordinated participation of a variety of functionally independent agencies operating in adjacent regions. In practice, this essential cooperation is sometimes not attained or is reduced due to poor information sharing, non-fluent communication flows, and lack of coordination. We report an empirical study of IT-mediated cooperation among Spanish response agencies and we describe the challenges of adoption, information sharing, communication flows, and coordination among agencies that do not share a unity of command. We analyze three strategies aimed at supporting acceptance and surmounting political, organizational and personal distrust or skepticism: participatory design, advanced collaborative tools inducing cognitive absorption, and end-user communities of practice. ; This work has been funded by the Grant (PR2007-0271) and the Research Project (TSI2007-60388) of Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. SIGAME is a project funded by Dirección General de Protección Civil y Emergencias of Spanish Ministry of Interior. ; Publicado