Community Resilience in Crises : Technology and Social Media Enablers

Abstract

Technology can contribute greatly to disaster resilience, especially by enhancing the interconnectedness between the authorities and the public and by facilitating the rapid exchange of information. This special issue of Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments is focused on technology and social media enablers of community resilience. Crises take on a variety of shapes and forms—natural or health disasters, terroristic and criminal acts, technology malfunctions, and large-scale accidents—at the local, regional, national, and global levels. Crisis management plans, created and implemented at the organizational level, typically involve public service and institutional authorities overseeing emergency response. However, contemporary crises, because of scale, complexity, or immediacy, are more likely to require collaboration with citizen responders to deal quickly with evolving situations.