Investigating Inter-Organizational Collaboration during the Haiti Relief Effort from a Macrocognition Perspective

摘要

On January 12, 2010, Haiti experienced a 7.0 magnitude earthquake 10 miles from its capital city of Port-au-Prince. The global relief effort that followed was on a scale that to date has been unmatched. Relief organizations, responders from many 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 air, ground, and ocean-based assistance crews were recorded in the All Partners Area Network (APAN) collaboration system. APAN data from the Haiti relief effort provided the data that were analyzed for this study. The goal of the study is to understand the role of cognition in distributed teams who are collaborating to solve challenging, unique, dynamic, information-rich problems, and to apply this understanding to make recommendations for collaboration support. The research described in this paper focuses on the contextually bound processes involved in sense making, managing uncertainty, and related cognitive processes entailed in responding to emerging events that occur in dynamic decision-making situations. We examined team collaboration in the context of the Haiti Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR) operation. We elected to analyze this data set as it represents a large set of real-world data with all the characteristics of interest for conducting an empirical evaluation of the model of team collaboration. The presentation includes briefing charts.