Little attention has been given to how citizens use technology to be resilient when their country is at war. We report on an ethnographic interview study of how technology was adopted and used by citizens to be resilient during wartime. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens experiencing the current Iraq war. Based on our data we identified properties of resilience: reconfiguring social networks, self-organization, redundancy, proactive practices, and repairing trust in information. Technology supported people in being resilient by enabling them to control identity, to collaborate across religious sects, to create an organizational memory, and to provide alternative sources of news and information. As people adopted and used technology to be resilient we found a merging of old and new cultural practices. We discuss these systemic changes and describe implications for how technology can support people in being resilient when their environment is disrupted. Author Keywords Disrupted environments, technology adoption, culture

Citizen journalism has changed the nature of how news is disseminated about local and global events. We conducted an ethnographic study of a particular kind of citizen journalism: the use of war diaries on the Internet. These diaries were targeted to an audience outside of the informants ’ countries and cultures. We found that people wrote war diaries to reach out to people who were in environments not in a war as a way of sensemaking, for impression management, and to be participants in the social production of news and opinions about the war. We discuss how the use of a “war diary ” as a public narrative empowered our informants and how they contributed to the social interpretation of their culture during war. Through the Internet war diary, people can communicate news beyond the physical boundaries of their country providing benefits to producers of the information as well as the consumers.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of the technology-enabled behavior that took place amongst a citizen population living in a conflict zone. We interviewed 65 Iraqi citizens who experienced the current Gulf War beginning in March 2003. In the context of a disrupted environment, trust in people and institutions can erode. We find that trust is contextual–-as aspects of the physical world change, conceptions of trust can also change. We show how people were able to create a context of trust in the environment by using ICTs to manage their public identity, to conduct background checks, and to develop collaborative practices that relied on those with whom interpersonal trust previously existed. These new practices, in turn, enabled people to maintain work collaborations, to determine whether or not to continue interacting with others in public, to be able to travel safely, and to find trustworthy jobs. In developing these new practices we argue that technology enabled people to restore a sense of normalcy in an environment that had radically changed.

We present a vision of the future of emergency management that better supports inclusion of activities and information from members of the public during disasters and mass emergency events. Such a vision relies on integration of multiple subfields of computer science, and a commitment to an understanding of the domain of application. It supports the hopes of a grid/cyberinfrastructure-enabled future that makes use of social software. However, in contrast to how emergency management is often understood, it aims to push beyond the idea of monitoring on-line activity, and instead focuses on an understudied but critical aspect of mass emergency response—the needs and roles of members of the public. By viewing the citizenry as a powerful, self-organizing, and collectively intelligent force, information and communication technology can play a transformational role in crisis. Critical topics for research and development include an understanding of the quantity and quality of information (and its continuous change) produced through computer-mediated communication during emergencies; mechanisms for ensuring trustworthiness and security of information; mechanisms for aligning informal and formal sources of information; and new applications of information extraction techniques.

People depend on human infrastructure for a range of activities in their daily lives, such as work and socializing. In this paper we consider three different intertwined types of infrastructures of a society that may be affected in crisis situations: the physical, technological, and human infrastructures. We argue that when the human infrastructure is damaged, e.g. in a natural catastrophe or war, then people can switch reliance to the technological infrastructure to be resilient. We conducted an empirical study of 85 people who lived in war zones during the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon war and the ongoing Gulf war in Iraq. In this paper, we report how information technology is used by our informants in new ways in their attempt to maintain social relationships and continue working. Our informants also used technology to help navigate safe routes for travel and for psychological support. We discuss implications of our results for disaster research.

This paper considers a subset of the technology-enabled communication that took place among citizen populations experiencing various disruptions, e.g. disaster and war. In the context of a disrupted environment, trust can erode where people no longer rely on institutions for support (i.e. the government), or where citizens do not trust other people. We argue that depending on what is taking place in the physical world, trust in people, information, and institutions can change – in this sense, trust is contextual. We then offer recommendations for designing new technologies for people who experience disruption, taking into account trust and context.

We argue that the disruption associated with war can help develop a deeper theoretical and practical understanding of how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enable people to repair practices in the work, social, and education spaces. We focus on how people leverage various ICTs in order to reconstitute their social world, which will allow us to develop new technologies to aid those who experience similar situations.

The CHI community has led efforts to support teamwork, but has neglected team disruption, as may occur if team members relocate to another institution. We studied moves in 548 interdisciplinary research projects with 2691 researchers (PIs). Moves, and thus disruptions, were not rare, especially in large distributed projects. Overall, onethird of all projects experienced at least one member relocating but most moves reflected churn across highranking institutions. When collaborators moved, the project was disrupted. Our data suggest that moves exemplify normal disruptions. A design challenge is to help projects adapt to disruption. Author Keywords Distributed work, turnover, virtual organization,

We examine microblogged information generated during two different co-occurring natural hazards events in Spring 2009. Due to its rapid and widespread adoption, microblogging in emergency response is a place for serious consideration and experimentation for future application. Because microblogging is comprised of a set of practices shaped by a number of forces, it is important to measure and describe the diffuse, multi-party information exchange behaviors to anticipate how emergency governance might best play a role. Here we direct consideration toward information propagation properties in the Twitterverse, describing features of information redistribution related to the retweet (RT @) convention. Our analysis shows that during an emergency, for tweets authored by local users and tweets that contain emergency-related search terms, retweets are more likely than non-retweets to be about the event. We note that users are more likely to retweet information originally distributed through Twitter accounts run by media, especially the local media, and traditional service organizations. Comparing local users to the broader audience, we also find that tweet-based information redistribution is different for those who are local to an emergency event.

Crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from routine situations, as the field of disaster studies has described over its 100-year history. With increasingly pervasive information and communications technology and a changing political arena where terrorism is perceived as a major threat, the attention to crisis is high. Some of these new features of social life have created changes in disaster response that we are only beginning to understand. The University of Colorado is establishing an area of sociologically informed research and information and communications technology development in crisis informatics. This article reports on research that examines features of computer-mediated communication and information sharing activity during and after the April 16, 2007, crisis at Virginia Tech by members of the public. The authors consider consequences that these technology-supported social interactions have on emergency response and implications for methods in e-Social Science.