Open Virtual Collaboration Environment for the Whole of Society Crisis Response Community

Crisis response situations require collaboration across many different organizations with different backgrounds, training, procedures and objectives. The response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in 2005 emphasized the importance of effective communication and collaboration. Compounding the challenges associated with collaboration during crisis situations is the distributed nature of the supporting organizations and the lack of a designated leader recognized across military, government and non-government organizations. The US Army Research Laboratory is working with the University of Edinburgh, the University of Virginia, Perigean Technologies and Carnegie Mellon University in the creation of an openly accessible “Virtual Collaborative Environment” (VCE) to support the “Whole of Society Crisis Response” (WoSCR) community of interest and crisis action planning activities. The VCE consist of a collaborative portal containing a suite of Web 2.0 social networking and group tools including data visualization facilities, a 3D virtual collaboration space and a collaboration protocol. All tools were selected to support the key functions identified in a cognitive work analysis (CWA) for distributed collaboration and chosen to be open source or as accessible as possible to allow them to be made available to the wide range of organizations that make up the crisis response community.