Improving emergency and disaster response management through bidirectional communication between citizens and decision-makers – A field test on the coordination of spontaneous volunteers

Abstract

Cooperation between different stakeholders plays an important role in managing crises and disasters. The software tools used must also support cooperation and the mutual exchange of information. The bidirectional exchange of information between the population and official agencies poses a particular challenge. In this paper, we present a software demonstrator for the coordination of spontaneous volunteers and its evaluation as part of an overarching research project to gain design knowledge for the development of interconnected systems in disaster management. We describe how the system demonstrator was instantiated on the basis of our existing design knowledge from technical requirements and reference architecture and show the respective interfaces for the stakeholders involved. As the main contribution of the paper, we describe the implementation of a field test to evaluate the demonstrator and present the results in terms of usability and perceived usefulness, which we obtained using a methodologically sound questionnaire.