Understanding distributed collaboration in emergency animal disease response

2009. Jane Li & Kenton O'Hara
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7.

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in CSCW systems for supporting emergency and crisis management. In this paper we explore work practices in emergency animal disease management focusing on the high-level analysis and decision making of the Australian Consultative Committee for Emergency Animal Disease (CCEAD) - a geographically distributed committee established to recommend action plans during animal disease outbreak. Our findings explore the ways in which they currently share and analyse information together, focusing in particular on their teleconferencing mediated meetings. Our findings highlight factors relating to the time pressure of the task, diverse configuration of the group and asymmetrical settings and how these influence the groups information sharing and communication. We use the findings to discuss implications for collaboration technologies that could support the group and broader implications for similarly structured work groups.

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Citation

Li, J., & O'Hara, K. (2009). Understanding distributed collaboration in emergency animal disease response. Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7 (pp. 65–72). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/1738826.1738838, doi:10.1145/1738826.1738838

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/1738826.1738838,
author = {Li, Jane and O'Hara, Kenton},
title = {Understanding distributed collaboration in emergency animal disease response},
year = {2009},
isbn = {9781605588544},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/1738826.1738838},
doi = {10.1145/1738826.1738838},
abstract = {There is an increasing interest in CSCW systems for supporting emergency and crisis management. In this paper we explore work practices in emergency animal disease management focusing on the high-level analysis and decision making of the Australian Consultative Committee for Emergency Animal Disease (CCEAD) - a geographically distributed committee established to recommend action plans during animal disease outbreak. Our findings explore the ways in which they currently share and analyse information together, focusing in particular on their teleconferencing mediated meetings. Our findings highlight factors relating to the time pressure of the task, diverse configuration of the group and asymmetrical settings and how these influence the groups information sharing and communication. We use the findings to discuss implications for collaboration technologies that could support the group and broader implications for similarly structured work groups.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7},
pages = {65–72},
numpages = {8},
keywords = {workplace study, emergency response, distributed collaboration},
location = {Melbourne, Australia},
series = {OZCHI '09}
}