Investigating inter-organizational collaboration during the Haiti relief effort from a macrocognition perspective
On January 12, 2010, a massive earthquake ravished Haiti's capital city of Port-au-Prince. Relief organizations, government and people from all over the world poured into Haiti to help address the devastating circumstances. Throughout the relief effort the communications that transpired between responders were recorded in the All Partners Area Network (APAN) collaboration systems. APAN data from the Haiti relief effort was analyzed for this research where we employed an empirical process to evaluate a model of team collaboration. We analyzed the inter-agency collaborative communication by applying definitions to each thought unit posted by responders. Macrocognition is a nascent area of knowledge engineering that focuses on understanding how cognition emerges in natural environments. The goal for the research reported here is to understand the role of cognition in teams who are collaborting to solve unique, challenging, ambiguous, information-rich problems. Results indicate the task environment will influence which macrocogntive processes are used and we found evidence for several new macrocognitive processes. A more complete model of team collaboration can guide designers of collaboration tools to facilitate decision making as part of the overall task.