Using social network analysis to explore issues of latency, connectivity, interoperability & sustainability in community disaster response

Community-based disaster response is gaining attention in the United States because of major problems with domestic disaster recovery over the last decade. A social network analysis approach is used to illustrate how community-academic partnerships offer one way to leverage information about existing, mediated relationships with the community through trusted actors. These partnerships offer a platform that can be used to provide entré into communities that are often closed to outsiders, while also allowing greater access to community embedded physical assets and human resources, thus facilitated more culturally appropriate crisis response. Using existing, publically available information about funded community-academic partnerships in Wisconsin, USA, we show how social network analysis of these meta-organizations may provide critical information about both community vulnerabilities in disaster and assist in rapidly identifying these community resources in the aftermath of a crisis event that may provide utility for boundary spanning crisis information systems.