"Mobilising helpers in the event of a flood or letting friends know that you are okay in the event of a terrorist attack - more and more people are using social media in emergency, crisis or disaster situations. Storms, floods, attacks or pandemics (esp. COVID-19) show that citizens use social media to inform themselves or to coordinate. This book presents qualitative and quantitative studies on the attitudes of emergency services and citizens in Europe towards social media in emergencies. Across the individual sub-studies, almost 10,000 people are surveyed including representative studies in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and Italy. The work empirically shows that social media is increasingly important for emergency services, both for prevention and during crises; that private use of social media is a driving force in shaping opinions for organisational use; and that citizens have high expectations towards authorities, especially monitoring social media is expected, and sometimes responses within one hour. Depending on the risk culture, the data show further differences, e.g. whether the state (Germany) or the individual (Netherlands) is seen as primarily responsible for coping with the situation."--Cover page 4.

Mobilising helpers in the event of a flood or letting friends know that you are okay in the event of a terrorist attack – more and more people are using social media in emergency, crisis or disaster situations. Storms, floods, attacks or pandemics (esp. COVID-19) show that citizens use social media to inform themselves or to coordinate. This book presents qualitative and quantitative studies on the attitudes of emergency services and citizens in Europe towards social media in emergencies. Across the individual sub-studies, almost 10,000 people are surveyed including representative studies in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and Italy. The work empirically shows that social media is increasingly important for emergency services, both for prevention and during crises; that private use of social media is a driving force in shaping opinions for organisational use; and that citizens have high expectations towards authorities, especially monitoring social media is expected, and sometimes responses within one hour. Depending on the risk culture, the data show further differences, e.g. whether the state (Germany) or the individual (Netherlands) is seen as primarily responsible for coping with the situation.

Marc-André Kaufhold explores user expectations and design implications for the utilization of new media in crisis management and response. He develops a novel framework for information refinement, which integrates the event, organisational, societal, and technological perspectives of crises. Therefore, he reviews the state of the art on crisis informatics and empirically examines the use, potentials and barriers of both social media and mobile apps. Based on these insights, he designs and evaluates ICT concepts and artifacts with the aim to overcome the issues of information overload and quality in large-scale crises, concluding with practical and theoretical implications for technology adaptation and design.

Social media is invaluable during crises like natural disasters, but difficult to analyze. This book shows how computer science can help.

The 9th European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation (ECIME) is being hosted this year by the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK on the 21-22 September 2015. The Conference Chair is Dr Elias Pimenidis, and the Programme Chair is Dr Mohammed Odeh both from the host University. ECIME provides an opportunity for individuals researching and working in the broad field of information systems management, including IT evaluation to come together to exchange ideas and discuss current research in the field. This has developed into a particularly important forum for the present era, where the modern challenges of managing information and evaluating the effectiveness of related technologies are constantly evolving in the world of Big Data and Cloud Computing. We hope that this year’s conference will provide you with plenty of opportunities to share your expertise with colleagues from around the world. The keynote speakers for the Conference are Professor Haris Mouratidis, from the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Brighton, UK who will address the topic “Rethinking Information Systems Security”, Dr Mohammed Odeh, from the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK and Dr. Mario Kossmann from Airbus, UK who will talk about “The Significance of Information Systems Management and Evaluation in the Aerospace Industry’ ECIME 2015 received an initial submission of 55 abstracts. After the double-blind peer review process 28 academic Research papers, 5 PhD Research papers, 1 Masters Research paper and 3 Work in Progress papers have been accepted for these Conference Proceedings. These papers represent research from around the world, including Austria, Botswana, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ireland, Japan, Kuwait, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK and the USA.

This book promotes a meaningful and appropriate dialogue and cross-disciplinary partnerships on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in governance and disaster management. The frequency and the cost of losses and damages due to disasters are rising every year. From wildfires to tsunamis, drought to hurricanes, floods to landslides combined with chemical, nuclear and biological disasters of epidemic proportions has increased human vulnerability and ecosystem sustainability. Life is not as it used to be and governance to manage disasters cannot be a business as usual. The quantum and proportion of responsibilities with the emergency services has increased many times to strain them beyond their human capacities. Its time that the struggling disaster management services get supported and facilitated by new technology of combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) with Data Analytics Technologies (DAT)to serve people and government in disaster management. AI and ML have advanced to a state where they could be utilized for many operations in disaster risk reduction. Even though many disasters cannot be prevented and a number of them are blind natural disasters yet through an appropriate application of AI and ML quick predictions, vulnerability identification and classification of relief and rescue operations could be achieved.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective, EGOVIS 2016, held in Porto, Portugal, in September 2016, in conjunction with DEXA 2015. The 22 revised full papers presented together with three invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: e-government cases - legal issues; e-government cases - technical issues; open data and transparency; knowledge representation and modeling in e-government; intelligent systems in e-government; e-government research and intelligent systems; e-government data and knowledge management; identity management in e-government.