Interview on Disaster Zone Show at King County TV

I had the great pleasure to appear as featured interview guest on the 30-minute Disaster Zone TV show in downtown Seattle. The show is hosted by Eric Holdeman, one of the nation’s most highly reputed experts on disaster response management. Holdeman is a former emergency manager himself who held managerial positions at Federal, State, and County levels. The show is produced by King County TV and watched by professional emergency responders around the nation. The recorded edition of the show will be on the air shortly and can already be watched on YouTube. (Video, 24:55)

Research on “Cascadia Rising 2016″—The Exercise Addressing the “Big One”

The research team and I are currently on the home stretch with our analysis of the Cascadia Rising 2016 exercise, which tested the response capabilities of first responders in the Pacific Northwest to a magnitude 9+ earthquake and tsunami. The exercise involved about 23,000 participants from all levels of government in the region along with FEMA, private-sector companies, and non-governmental relief organizations. The insights garnered from the exercise were many and daunting. The exercise revealed that not only the region of impact but rather the nation as a whole would face a major challenge when this catastrophe becomes a reality. Therefore it comes as no surprise that the exercise will be repeated soon (2022), which will be informed from the lessons learned from the 2016 exercise and also operate under even more realistic assumptions and injects. Our study of CR16 focused on two major areas:

— (Shared) Situational Awareness and Common Operating Picture, and

— Managerial Challenges

For the first area, we were happy to have two papers accepted at two major international conferences, one of which even became a “best-paper nominee.” The papers and presentation slides of the first two papers on shared situational awareness (SSA) and the common operating picture (COP) can be found below:

ISCRAM Asia Pacific Conference (2018)

Scholl, H. J., Hubbel, K., & Leonard, J. (2018). Communications and Technology Challenges to Situational Awareness: Insights from the CR16 Exercise. In Proceedings of the 1st ISCRAM Asia-Pacific Conference (pp. 1-15). Wellington, NZ: ISCRAM. (Best paper nominee)

Paper | Presentation Slides (29.3 MB)

52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52)

Scholl, H. J., Hubbell, K., & Leonard, J. G. (2019). Information Sharing and Situational Awareness: Insights from the Cascadia Rising Exercise of June 2016. In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52) (pp. 1-11). Maui, HI

Paper | Presentation Slides (19.2 MB)

Our paper on “Managerial Challenges” is currently under development.  We are planning to finish our analysis of the managerial challenges observed during the Cascadia Rising 2016 exercise by the end of March 2019. We will post the result also here.

11,211 Entries and Counting: DGRL 14.5 Has Been Published

Version 14.5 of the Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL), which was previously named Electronic Government Reference Library (EGRL), has been published as of December 15, 2018. The library now contains 11,211 references of predominantly English-language, peer-reviewed work in the study domains of digital government, digital governance, and digital democracy.

This marks a 8.9% increase in references from version 14.0 (June of 2018) and a 13.2% increase from version 13.5 (December of 2017). This past publication period has yet been another good one for e-Government-related publishing adding another 4-digit number (1,310) of new peer-reviewed academic references within the past 12 months.

The DGRL has become an indispensable tool for e-Gov scholars. In particular, reviewers of paper submissions are reported to rely heavily on this reference library. Packaged in a 12.14 MB zip file, bibTeX, RIS, and an Endnote XML versions are available. Mendeley or Zotero versions can easily be created by importing from RIS or bibTeX files. Please get back to us in case of any errors or omissions. Thank you for your interest and cooperation.

For a free download please use this link. You will be asked to register or re-register.

Disaster Information Reference Library Version 1.0 Published

Following the role model of the highly successful Digital Government Reference Library, now the first version of the Disaster Information Reference Library (DIRL) has been published. Initially the DIRL contains 2,109 references of peer-reviewed academic publications in the English language. The DIRL is scheduled to be updated semi-annually. More information is available here.

Ongoing “iSchool Qualitative Research Project(s)” iQRP

During the Academic Year of 2018/2019 I continue to offer the iQRP series of qualitative research immersions open to students from all programs. Details will be communicated via the various program listservs.

My main research foci include:

  • Digital Government (Information, ICTs, and the Public Sector)
    • Smart City, Smart Government, Smart Governance, and Smart Infrastructures
    • Distributed Ledger Technology / Blockchain in the Public Sector
  • Disaster Information Management
    • Situational Awareness and Managerial Challenges
  • Application/System Evaluation
    • TEDS framework  (for example, we analyzed and helped improve Seattle Sounders FC mobile app)
  • Formats of Involvement: Research Assistant
    • Independent Study (minimum 1 credit = 4 hours a week, 3 credits = 10 hours)
    • Volunteer (minimum 1 credit = 5 hours a week)
  • Roles of Research Assistants
    • Being introduced to the foundations and practices of qualitative inquiry
    • Assistant in research design, interviewer, data collector, transcriber, coder, data analyzer, co-author of research reports, & presenter of research results