When Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf coast, many organizations and individuals acted to try to respond to the needs of the thousands of people affected and to restore order in the chaotic aftermath of the storm. As is typical of disaster-response scenarios, these efforts involved multiple organizations with different areas of focus, making coordination of activities essential in order to avoid fragmentation, gaps in service, and wasteful duplication of services.
This coordination is achieved largely through interorganizational networks, which serve as conduits for directives, information, and resources. The unfolding of these networks over time is a critical element of the response process, and the networks provide insight into the nature of interorganizational coordination during disasters.
This project seeks to advance our understanding of interorganizational coordination in disaster response by analyzing the emergent multi-organization networks (EMONs) involved in the response to Hurricane Katrina and by exploring the potential for real-time intervention in such EMONs. Using novel computational and statistical methods, the research will capture, validate, and integrate data from news reports, official documents, and other information sources (such as blogs) to produce estimates of interorganizational interaction over time.
The data produced by this research will be a key resource for social scientists, disaster researchers, information technologists, and policy analysts studying problems related to the Katrina response, and the findings, tools and methodologies derived from the research will be generalizable to a wide range of disaster-response situations.
