Derek Werthmuller’s research while affiliated with University at Albany, State University of New York and other places

Disseminating information to the public is critical in emergency management. Thanks to technological advances in recent decades, governments can instantly reach citizens through multiple channels. Existing research on emergency messaging indicates that the effectiveness of messaging depends on multiple factors, including receivers' characteristics, message content and style, as well as the social and political contexts. However, what is still missing in the literature is a better understanding of the role of technology use for emergency messaging, particularly in local governments. Based on the Technology Affordances and Constraints Theory (TACT) and a practice perspective, we analyzed interview data from eighteen local emergency management agencies in the United States to investigate four questions: (1) what digital artifacts are used for writing and sending messages? (2) how do the artifacts afford emergency managers in writing and sending messages? (3) what are the constraints that impede effective messaging? and (4) how do governments cope with those difficulties? We find four types of artifacts involved in emergency messaging, their affordances, and constraints, as well as some strategies for mitigating negative impacts. The findings extend current knowledge about emergency messaging from the point of view of front-line staff and add insights into the TACT.

Emergency messaging is crucial in saving lives and avoiding property damage during natural or human-made disasters. Advancements in digital technologies have expanded the ability of emergency managers to reach citizens, particularly through the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system, which notifies citizens in a specific geographic area via their own mobile devices. There have been studies from the perspective of citizens, but little research has been conducted from the perspective of the message senders and focusing on the technology they use. This study aims to better understand the perspective of alerting authorities by examining a case where a participatory design (PD) approach is utilized to create a digital technology that allows alerting authorities to write messages more efficiently and effectively. We seek to understand the processes for implementing effective PD in a technology application used for emergency messaging and also investigate stakeholders' needs and expectations, as well as the role of knowledge sharing during the design processes.

Cross-boundary information sharing has a decisive influence on managing natural or human-made disasters. Existing literature provides valuable insights into the actors engaged in information sharing, the factors that influence their willingness to share information, the specific content they share, and the main results of information sharing in the context of emergency management. However, despite these contributions, our current knowledge about this topic is still limited in several ways, including overgeneralizing the involved actors, frequently ignoring the interdependence of multiple information-sharing flows, and a lack of empirical research that assesses information-sharing activities from a holistic point of view. Consequently, this study intends to extend the current discussion by empirically exploring the actors in detail and analyzing the multiple-flow information sharing dynamics. A case study of public alerts and warnings in US local governments was conducted to investigate the distinctive actors and features of information sharing and the factors that affect the information-sharing dynamics. Our interviews with eighteen alerting authorities indicate that both government and nongovernment actors can be subdivided into more specific categories with varying information needs, information resources, and levels of authority. We also find that the success of public alerts and warnings depends largely on the activities in two closely connected stages of information sharing: government-to-government and government-to-citizen, each of which faces unique challenges and has specific enablers. These findings reveal that only through a detailed analysis of various actors and information sharing flows can we have a holistic understanding of cross-boundary information sharing for emergency management and, from a practice perspective, provide a more accurate problem diagnosis for future improvement.

Governments have vast data resources related to a wide-variety of policies and programs. Integrating and sharing data across agencies and departments can add value to these data resources and bring about significant changes in public services as well as better government decisions. However, in addition to the lack of standards and an adequate information architecture, the main obstacles to a centralized government data-sharing strategy are security and privacy concerns. Blockchain - a decentralized peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology - provides a new way to develop sharing mechanisms. In addition, blockchain-based systems are difficult to tamper with and are highly traceable. Based on the current problems of a big data center in the city of Ningbo, China, this paper identifies limitations of this approach and explores the potential of some data sharing mechanism based on blockchain technology. Our analysis describes some potential advantages and the feasibility of using distributed data sharing and automated management mechanisms based on blockchain smart contracts. We also explore implementation challenges and provide some practical recommendations.

This poster describes an ongoing research project that builds an IoT data management experimental environment based on Ethereum Blockchain and smart contracts. The goal of the project is to simulate the application of IoT devices in smart city initiatives, and explore how IoT data management could benefit from Blockchain technology. In this project, there are three basic questions we are attempting to answer. 1) How do you link various kinds of IoT devices to the Blockchain, as they have different computing capabilities? 2) How do you store data on Blockchain from different IoT devices, and retrieve data for further utilization? 3) To what extent, smart contracts can be designed to implement automated data access management?