The frequency, scale, and impacts of natural and man-made disasters have markedly increased over the past decades. This new E-Government Minitrack considers this as a major concern for citizens, communities, and governments. As they have become more networked through smart mobile systems and intelligent information and communication technologies (ICT), the level of interdependency and new vulnerability seem to have been increased in our societies. We consider collecting, processing, evaluating, sense making, sharing, and communicating information in dynamically changing disaster environments a relevant and timely research theme for national and global research.

Prior multi-disciplinary research on disaster prevention and disaster mitigation has shown that ICT play increasingly important roles in all phases of a comprehensive disaster management cycle: disaster preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. Particularly, advanced ICT have enabled government agencies and non-profit organizations to mobilize agile and flexible disaster response and recovery operations in dynamically changing disaster situations. More recently, social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs, also have enabled citizens and communities to actively engage with government in disaster management through crowdsourcing of local disaster information. Despite these ICT-enabled recent advances in our societies, the growing social and technological interdependence and the resultant complexity have exposed citizens, communities, and governments to a new level of vulnerability to the impacts of natural hazards such as sustained large-area power failures and impaired critical infrastructures, resulting in a breakdown of communication in the aftermath of a disaster, a lack of actionable information, and an information chaos or black hole. This E-Government Minitrack contributes to the critical discourse in the HICSS community about roles of ICT as central information infrastructures in disaster management and their public policy implications for building resilient society.

Papers are invited that deal with any aspect of the analysis, design, development, deployment, implementation, integration, operation, use or evaluation of ICT for any phase of the comprehensive disaster management cycle. Authors may focus on the tools, functionalities, and/or interfaces that support human actors in disaster management. Also, the specific organizational and social challenges in the context of emergency and disaster management are of particular interest. Questions include the use of advanced ICT, including ubiquitous mobile systems, social media channels, and smart phones BYOD to cope with the aforementioned challenges.

Topics and research areas include, but are not limited to:

1. -Theoretical foundations and research methods in ICT-enabled disaster management
   

2. -Early warning systems
   

3. -Geographic information systems (GIS) and Global positioning systems (GPS) in disaster management
   

4. -Roles of ICT, mobile systems, and social media as information infrastructures in disaster management
   

5. -Challenges in ICT-enabled crisis/disaster/catastrophe operations and logistics management, including critical success and/or failure factors and case studies / lessons learned
   

6. -Crisis/disaster-related education and training
   

7. -ICT-enabled detection of socio-technological and socio-economic vulnerability
   

8. -Resilience and robustness of information infrastructures in extreme events and vulnerability of ICT
   

9. -Social networking, social media, and collaborative systems in disaster management
   

10. -Crowdsourcing for enhanced disaster situational awareness, citizen engagement and public value creation
    

11. -Information quality and cross-agency disaster information sharing
    

12. -ICT to facilitate cross-sector collaboration and interoperation to manage emergent  disaster dynamics
    

13. -Integration and interoperation of information systems in crises/disasters/extreme events
    

14. -Human and organizational information behavior in crises/disasters and their implications for human-centered design
    

Best papers will be considered for publication in the Special Issue on "Disaster Management Innovation through Advanced ICT" in the International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age (Chris Reddick, Editor-in-Chief). Hans Jochen Scholl (The Information School at the University of Washington, USA) and Akemi Takeoka Chatfield (The Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia) serve as guest co-editors for the Special Issue.

More co-chair information

Akemi Takeoka Chatfield, PhD, serves as director of the E-Government & E-Governance Research Center/Disaster Informatics and is a Senior Lecturer in IT within the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences of University of Wollongong in Australia, and a visiting Professor at Kyoto University, Disaster Prevention Research Institute under the 2010 Extreme Weather Conditions Research Program funding.  Her research interests include networked disaster response, social media-enabled early warning networks, networked organizations’ information behaviors, network technology benefits realization, social media in government, transformational e-government, open government policy, smart community, and collaborative forms of governance. She published in Journal of Management Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Information Systems Frontier, Communications of the ACM, Data Base, International Journal of Electronic Governance, and Electronic Journal of E-Government. Akemi (with Hans J. Scholl) serves as a guest co-editor for International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age, SI on “Disaster Management Innovation through Advanced ICT”.

Jose J. Gonzalez, PhD, has a long experience as professor of ICT and information security at the University of Agder and as adjunct professor of information security at Gjøvik University College, both in Norway. He leads the Centre for Integrated Emergency Management. Dr. Gonzalez has published in leading journals and conferences on SD modeling, information security, critical infrastructure, organizational learning and Interactive Training Environments. Many of these papers are the result of international cooperation involving an extensive network of German, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish and American partners. Among the most recent large-scale projects led and coordinated by Dr. Gonzalez are AMBASEC (funded by the Research Council of Norway and the Norwegian Oil Industry Association), dealing with incident response and handling in Integrated Operations in the oil & gas sector. Dr. Gonzalez also participated in the recent SEMPOC project, funded by the EU through the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection.

Tina Comes, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Integrated Emergency Management at the University of Agder, Norway, and head of the interdisciplinary research unit ‘Risk Management’ at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. In 2011, she received her PhD on the topic of distributed scenario-based multi-criteria decision support from the KIT. Her research aims at bridging the gap between formal models and ready-to-use evaluations by designing ICT systems for collaborative and distributed decision support that aim at enhancing understanding and communication between experts, decision makers and stakeholders. To cover this domain, Dr. Comes combines her formal and analytic background with knowledge in economics, decision theory and cognition. Apart from participating in various international projects, she is an active member of the Centre for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology (CEDIM), an interdisciplinary research centre in disaster management founded by the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam and the KIT.