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.

In this paper we investigate strategies to support knowledge sharing in distributed, synchronous collaboration. Our goal is to propose, justify, and assess a multiple view approach to support common ground in geo-collaboration within multi-role teams. We argue that a collaborative workspace, which includes multiple rolespecific views coordinated with a team view, affords a clear separation between role-specific and shared data, enables the team to filter out role-specific details and share strategic knowledge, and allows serendipitous learning about knowledge and expertise within the team. We discuss some key issues that need to be addressed when designing multiple views as a collaborative visualization. We illustrate the design features of a geocollaborative prototype that address these issues in the context of two collaborative scenarios. We finally describe a laboratory method for investigating how multi-role teams establish common ground while the amount of prior shared knowledge and the type of visualization are experimentally manipulated.

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Emergency management is more than just events occurring within an emergency situation. It encompasses a variety of persistent activities such as planning, training, assessment, and organizational change. We are studying emergency management planning practices in which geographic communities (towns and regions) prepare to respond efficiently to significant emergency events. Community emergency management planning is an extensive collaboration involving numerous stakeholders throughout the community and both reflecting and challenging the communityÕs structure and resources. Geocollaboration is one aspect of the effort. Emergency managers, public works directors, first responders, and local transportation managers need to exchange information relating to possible emergency event locations and their surrounding areas. They need to examine geospatial maps together and collaboratively develop emergency plans and procedures. Issues such as emergency vehicle traffic routes and staging areas for command posts, arriving media, and personal first respondersÕ vehicles must be agreed upon prior to an emergency event to ensure an efficient and effective response. This work presents a software architecture that facilitates the development of geocollaboration solutions. The architecture extends prior geocollaboration research and reuses existing geospatial information models. Emergency management planning is one application domain for the architecture. Geocollaboration tools can be developed that support community-wide emergency management planning and preparedness. This paper describes how the software architecture can be used for the geospatial, emergency management planning activities of one community.