Emergencies often have causes and effects that are global. However, emergencies are also inherently local: They occur in a particular place and point in time. While it is critical for governments and society to better organize emergency management top-down, it is also important to become more aware of local community-level values, planning, involvement, knowledge, and skill. Local communities plan collaboratively for potential emergencies of varying scales.Our discipline of Human-Computer Interaction studies the interaction between people and computers. Researchers in this field consider how information technology affects emergency management. They aim to improve emergency management through the design of useful and novel interfaces to technology. The purpose of our work was to take a broader perspective on emergency management and investigate the models and patterns of emergency-related work practices. In particular, we examined emergency management from a local community perspective. This focus on local communities partly stems from our prior research on community groups and their use of information technology. It is also motivated by the realization that emergencies are local events, which happen in communities.This paper reports on a study of one community's emergency planning activities. Five aspects of community preparedness are discussed: collaborative efforts, local area details, local culture, geographic information, and emergency plans, and a case study provides concrete examples of each. Local community preparedness is complex and gives rise to many collaboration issues. Revealing this complexity, the paper offers some implications for community emergency management technology.KEYWORDS: emergency planning, ethnography, field study, human-computer interaction, community informatics * We thank the numerous people involved with emergency management in State College for their cooperation.

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We report on the use of scenario-based methods for evaluating collaborative systems. We describe the method, the case study where it was applied, and provide results of its efficacy in the field. The results suggest that scenariobased evaluation is effective in helping to focus evaluation efforts and in identifying the range of technical, human, organizational, and other contextual factors that impact system success. The method also helps identify specific actions such as prescriptions for design to enhance system effectiveness. However, we found the method somewhat less useful for identifying the measurable benefits gained from a CSCW implementation, which was one of our primary goals. We discuss challenges faced applying the technique, suggest recommendations for future research, and point to implications for practice.

Producing useful and usable software often requires continuous and iterative evaluation. This paper introduces a novel usability evaluation method based on the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations framework. The target of our evaluation is Herbal a suite of tools designed to simplify agent development by providing a high-level language and maintenance-oriented development environment. The method introduced here uncovers dimensions of concern, which are used to measure the usability of Herbal and to identify areas for improvement in the design. In this article, we demonstrate how we used dimensions of concern to effectively evaluate and improve usability, and we discuss ways in which our method can be adapted, extended, and applied to improving the usability of other interactive systems.