HCI challenges for community-based disaster recovery

Abstract

In disaster recovery, responding professional organizations traditionally assess the needs of communities following a disaster. Recent disasters have shown that volunteer capacities within the community are not yet integrated in recovery activities. To improve the efficiency of responding professionals and utilize the potential capacity from within the community, a platform is needed that identifies needs and capacities and provides situational overviews of recovery activities for different stakeholders. The proposed COBACORE platform aims to 1) bring community needs and capacities directly together, 2) allow professionals to better maintain awareness of recovery activities and to better deploy their capacities and 3) facilitate collaboration between professionals and responding communities. For each function and feature, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) challenges are outlined. In ongoing work, a first prototype of this platform is implemented and evaluated with stakeholders in simulated disaster recovery activities. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.