ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATIONS DURING THE HAITI RELIEF EFFORT to UNDERSTAND COGNITVE PROCESSES USED DURING TEAM COLLABORATION

摘要

On January 12, 2010, a massive earthquake ravished Haiti's capital city of Port-au-Prince. Relief organizations, governments, and people from all over the world poured into Haiti to help address the devastating circumstances. Throughout the relief effort the communications that transpired between responders were recorded in the All Partners Access Network (APAN) collaboration system. APAN data from the Haiti relief effort was analyzed for this research where we employed a content analysis to evaluate a model of team collaboration. We analyzed the inter-agency collaborative communication by applying definitions of the macrocognitive processes included in a model of team collaboration to each thought unit posted by responders. Chat log entries were content analyzed using an 18-dimensional conceptualization of the cognitive components of team collaboration. Macrocognition is a nascent area of knowledge engineering that focuses on understanding how cognition emerges in natural environments. The goal for the research reported here is to understand the role of cognition in teams who are collaborating to solve unique, challenging, ambiguous, information-rich problems and to leverage this understanding to make recommendations for human-system interaction design improvements. Results indicate the task environment will influence which macrocognitive processes are used and we found evidence for several new macrocognitive processes. Recommendations for user interface design improvements include developing separate windows to support critical components of the task. A more complete model of team collaboration can guide designers of collaboration tools to facilitate decision making as part of the overall task.