Emergency management planning as collaborative community work

Emergencies often have causes and effects that are global. However, emergencies are also inherently local: They occur in a particular place and point in time. While it is critical for gov-ernments and society to better organize emergency management top-down, it is also important to become more aware of local community-level values, planning, involvement, knowledge, and skill. Local communities plan collaboratively for potential emergencies of varying scales. Our discipline of Human-Computer Interaction studies the interaction between people and com-puters. Researchers in this field consider how information technology affects emergency man-agement. They aim to improve emergency management through the design of useful and novel interfaces to technology. The purpose of our work was to take a broader perspective on emergency management and investigate the models and patterns of emergency-related work practices. In par-ticular, we examined emergency management from a local community perspective. This focus on local communities partly stems from our prior research on community groups and their use of information technology. It is also motivated by the realization that emergencies are local events, which happen in communities