I've gotten into ISCRAM 2007's conference papers, and am about 1/5 of the way through the list.  There's some interesting papers in here.

In this post I'm going to talk about this paper in particular: A Dynamic Delphi Process Utilizing a Modified Thurstone Scaling Method: Collaborative Judgement in Emergency Response.

The paper is interesting because it's covering a higher level of decision making than what I've been reading about in Klein's "Sources of Power: How people make decisions".  This is discussing collaborative strategic decision making process instead of "groundpounders at the scene" decision making processes.  From their conclusion:

Even when all experts in a group may not be able to participate at the moment, or some may be unqualified to vote in a particular matter, nonetheless, a decision must be made. This system is conducive for decision making given the worst of conditions, utilizing the information as well as the experts to their fullest capacity. In a disaster, it may appear that there are only poor selections after such a tragic event has occurred. However, a best decision must still be made, thus minimizing potential future damages and hence, maximizing the best obtainable outcome for the challenges that lay ahead.

While the method described in the paper seems workable, I don't know that it could be implemented in practice, due to the conflicts of agendas.  I could see this being used as a strategic planning method, however -> trying to establish cross-disciplinary response scenarios prior to an event taking place. 

Several researchers have suggested that network externality is useful for understanding consumer behavior in a computer mediated environment. that is a very good idea to link economics and IS as we read the papers of economics IS through IS 362 class.

As the number of users gradually increases, firms’ efforts to provide better service and to gain market power ultimately leads to an increase of revenue and the value of firm.  Portal sites added users’ participation section and webpage which originally were formed for Users’ participation (myspace.com, youtube.com, etc.) and enhance their position based on users’ relationship in the online community.  Recently, the two-way merger between google.com and youtube.com best shows this relation. 

For this week, I focused on these websites, especially UCC to examine a network effect.  As the number of users for UCC is increasing, we see the value of web increasing and portals try to enhance that service.  Recently, as we observed the Google and Youtube merger, UCC has become one of the major resources of value increasing or profit and can be said to be the mainstream of trend.  Under today’s environment, websites’ higher effort to bring more visitors than more ads is the key to improve the value.

In fact, there are many research approaches and methodology for information systems. To be a IS researcher, I am not sure what approach is best related to my interests in Web 2.0, UCC, etc. In addition to traditional qualitative and quantitative research, I have learned many other approaches including economics IS, field study, etc from ICIS papers in IS 362 class. I think I need more work to match an approach with my interest topics. It will be interesting trail and journey for my research in summer.

And didn't realize that I still needed an 8th blog post.

So, quickly, a nuts-and-bolts update.

I'm about 15% of the way through devising the logical structure of an SQL database to store my papers, together with the meta information I want to track.  Here's the main areas of info I'm storing:

Source paper info: Authors (First, Last, Institution, Contact Address), Title, Abstract, Meta Classifications, References

Each Reference is going to contain the standard MLA type data.  This project is made more difficult by the fact that conference papers don't have ISBN numbers, so I can't use that as a unique identifier.  And since not all database back-ends support composite or compound keys, I'm going to have to generate a unique ID for each referece (and of course each original source).  The database build isn't terribly hard, it's the data entry that's going to be annoying.

Afterwards, though, I'll be able to generate a number of intersting queries and reports that can help analyze the field of crisis managment.

If anyone is interesting in glomming off of this and adding in other IS domains for their own edification, let me know.