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Hudumia: a platform to support spontaneous volunteers' situational awareness, coordination and safety underemergency scenarios
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| 5.07 MB | Adobe PDF |
Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Spontaneous volunteers always emerge under emergency scenarios and are vital to a
successful community response, yet some uncertainty subsists around their role and its inherent acceptance by official entities under emergency scenarios. In our research we
have identified that most of the spontaneous volunteers do have none or little support
from official entities, hence they end up facing critical problems as situational
awareness, safety instructions and guidance, motivation and group organization. We
argue that official entities still play a crucial role and should change some of their
behaviors regarding spontaneous volunteerism.
We aim with this thesis to design a software architecture and a framework in order to
implement a solution to support spontaneous volunteerism under emergency scenarios
along with a set of guidelines for the design of open information management systems.
Together with the collaboration from both citizens and emergency professionals we
have been able to attain several important contributions, as the clear identification of
the roles taken by both spontaneous volunteers and professionals, the importance of volunteerism in overall community response and the role which open collaborative information management systems have in the community volunteering efforts. These conclusions have directly supported the design guidelines of our software solution proposal.
In what concerns to methodology, we first review literature on technologies support to
emergencies and how spontaneous volunteers actually challenge these systems.
Following, we have performed a field research where we have observed that the
emerging of spontaneous volunteer’s efforts imposes new requirements for the design
of such systems, which leaded to the creation of a cluster of design guidelines that supported our software solution proposal to address the volunteers’ requirements.
Finally we have architected and developed an online open information management
tool which has been evaluated via usability engineering methods, usability user tests
and heuristic evaluations.
Description
Keywords
Volunteering Information management Software design requirements Emergencies Disaster relief Emergency response . Centro de Ciências Exatas e da Engenharia