Top > JDR > Exploring Community Attitudes Towards Sharing of Bushfire Info ...

single-dr.php

JDR Vol.11 No.3 pp. 552-558
(2016)
doi: 10.20965/jdr.2016.p0552

Paper:

Views over last 60 days: 1,032

Exploring Community Attitudes Towards Sharing of Bushfire Information Online

Paul Haimes*, Stuart Medley**, Danielle Brady**, and Tetsuaki Baba*

*Tokyo Metropolitan University
6-6 Asahigaoka, Hino, Tokyo 191-0065, Japan

**Edith Cowan University
2 Bradford Street Mount Lawley, WA 6050, Australia datesOctober 23, 2015February 29, 2016

Received:
October 23, 2015
Accepted:
February 29, 2016
Published:
June 1, 2016
Creative Commons License
Keywords:
Interface design, human factors, user testing, crowd-sourcing, spatial data
Abstract
This research describes outcomes from a project that aimed to present near real-time bushfire information to remote and regional Australian communities susceptible to bushfires through an intuitive and easy to use interface. This project arose as a response to calls for increased information sharing amongst communities and individuals in the wake of several severe fire events in Australia. Several rounds of user engagement were undertaken, which informed the design of an application that came to be known as MyFireWatch, which was launched as an officially-supported publicly-accessible web application. Previous research in Australia regarding bushfire information suggests that user-sourced data can provide rich, timely and meaningful information. Yet the MyFireWatch research, the first of its kind in Australia to ascertain community attitudes to user-sourced disaster information, found that user attitudes varied. This paper describes those user attitudes and how they pose both challenges and opportunities for organisations who provide publicly-accessible disaster information.
Cite this article as:
P. Haimes, S. Medley, D. Brady, and T. Baba, “Exploring Community Attitudes Towards Sharing of Bushfire Information Online,” J. Disaster Res., Vol.11 No.3, pp. 552-558, 2016.
Data files:
References
  1. [1] B. Fogg, “Persuasive technology: using computers to change what we think and do,” Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, 2003.
  2. [2] Geoscience Australia, “Natural Hazards In Australia: Identifying Risk Analysis Requirements,” 2007, http://www.ga.gov.au/corporate_data/65444/65444.pdf [accessed January 10, 2016]
  3. [3] Google, “About Google Maps,” 2015, http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7060 [accessed October 5, 2015]
  4. [4] P. Haimes, T. Baba, and S. Medley, “Mobile map applications and the democratisation of hazard information,” In Proc.of SIGGRAPH Asia, 2015.
  5. [5] P. Haimes, D. Brady, B. Clarkson, and S. Medley, “Engaging with communities as a design process: redesigning the FireWatch interface,” In the Australian & New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, 2013.
  6. [6] P. Hughes, “Social Media and Resilience to Wildfire Events,” In Wildfire and Community: Facilitating Preparedness and Resilience, pp. 300-322, 2012.
  7. [7] R. Kemp, “Public participatory GIS in community-based disaster risk reduction,” In Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, pp. 88-104, 2008.
  8. [8] Landgate, “MyFireWatch – bushfire map information Australia,” 2015, http://myfirewatch.landgate.wa.gov.au/ [accessed March 9, 2015]
  9. [9] D. Lorenzi, J. Vaidya, S. Chun, B. Shafiq, V. Naik, V. Atluri, and N. Adam, “Community Based Emergency Response,” In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, pp. 82-91, 2013.
  10. [10] V. Lanfranchi and N. Ireson, “User requirements for a collective intelligence emergency response system,” In Proc. of the 23rd British HCI Group Annual Conference on People and Computers: Celebrating People and Technology, pp. 198–203. British Computer Society, 2009.
  11. [11] S. Liu, “Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework: Designing Strategic Configurations of Crowdsourcing for the Emergency Management Domain,” In Comput. Supported Coop. Work, pp. 389-443, 2014.
  12. [12] E. Marcotte, “Responsive Web Design,” A Book Apart, New York, 2011.
  13. [13] National Academy of Sciences, “The Potential To Enhance Disaster Management: Key IT-Based Capabilities,” In Improving Disaster Management: The Role of IT in Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery, National Academies Press, 2007.
  14. [14] Y. Nawa, G. Urakawa, H. Ikemi, R. Hamamoto, and H. Hayashi, “Geography Network for Sharing Geospatial Information in Disaster Management,” In Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.5, No.1, pp. 108–116, 2010.
  15. [15] OpenLayers, “OpenLayers,” 2015, http://openlayers.org [accessed October 7, 2015]
  16. [16] S. Page, “Social Media Disaster information, fast and in your pocket: How GeoNet has embraced Social Media and mobile technology,” In the Australian & New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, 2013.
  17. [17] L. Palen, K. Anderson, G. Mark, J. Martin, D. Sicker, M. Palmer, and D. Grunwald, “A vision for technology-mediated support for public participation & assistance in mass emergencies & disasters,” In Proc. of the 2010 ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science Conference, 2010.
  18. [18] A. Popoola, D. Krasnoshtan, A.-P. Toth, V. Naroditskiy, C. Castillo, P. Meier, and I. Rahwan, “Information Verification During Natural Disasters,” In Proc. of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, 2013.
  19. [19] R. Power, B. Robinson, and C. Wise, “Comparing web feeds and tweets for emergency management,” In Proc.of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion, 2013.
  20. [20] Victoria Bushfires Commission, “2009 Victoria Bushfires Royal Commission Final Report,” 2010, http://www.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/finaldocuments/summary/PF/VBRC_Summary_PF.pdf [accessed October 5, 2015]
  21. [21] P. F. Wu, “Motivation for adopting emergency response technology in community settings,” In Proc. of the 22nd British HCI Group Annual Conference on People and Computers: Culture, Creativity, Interaction, Vol.2, pp. 259–260, British Computer Society, 2008.

Creative Commons License  This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationa License.

*This site is desgined based on HTML5 and CSS3 for modern browsers, e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera.

Last updated on Apr. 22, 2024