The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Information Sciences and Technology DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A TRANSACTIVE MEMORY SYSTEM PROTOTYPE FOR GEO-COLLABORATIVE CRISIS MANAGEMENT A Thesis in Information Sciences and Technology by Varun Adibhatla 2008 Varun Adibhatla Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science August 2008 ii The thesis of Varun Adibhatla was reviewed and approved* by the following: Michael McNeese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology Thesis Advisor David Hall Professor of Information Sciences and Technology Gerald Santoro Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology John Yen Professor of Information Sciences and Technology Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs of Information Sciences and Technology *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT Crisis management in today's technologically mediated world is a challenging task that requires the encoding, storing and retrieval of large amounts of knowledge and information far beyond the capabilities of the individual mind. Systems developed to serve the information needs of crisis management should therefore accommodate the distributed nature of work in this context. Crisis management personnel often work in teams and their activities are shaped based on their interactions with each other as well as their environment. Moreover, crisis management teams tend to develop idiosyncrasies in organizing their own knowledge thereby hindering future possibilities of communication or coordination with external agencies. Keeping this in mind, the research described in this thesis considers the cognitive activities of the team in designing relevant technology for crisis management. Transactive memory is a theory put forward by Daniel Wegner in an effort to understand the group mind. The theory asserts that groups would succeed in achieving their collective tasks better if they can emphasize specialization into the work through accurate expertise judgment and thus continuously reconcile an evolving and disparate knowledge base for the common benefit of the group. This thesis will thus use the transactive memory approach in designing a prototypical decision-support system for crisis management personnel. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .....................................................................................................vi LIST OF TABLES.......................................................................................................viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.........................................................................................ix Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................1 1.1 Transactive Memory ..............................................................................2 1.2 Common Operational Picture.................................................................6 1.3 Relevance to Crisis Management...........................................................7 1.4 Organization of thesis.............................................................................7 1.5 Summary of contributions......................................................................8 Chapter 2 Background and Context............................................................................10 2.1 NeoCITIES.............................................................................................10 2.2 Incident Command System ....................................................................13 2.3 Existing Systems ....................................................................................16 Chapter 3 Literature Review.......................................................................................20 3.1 Transactive memory...............................................................................20 3.2 Transactive memory and derivative works ............................................22 3.3 Organizational Memory .........................................................................26 Chapter 4 Theoretical Contributions...........................................................................35 4.1 Nested Transactive Memory ..................................................................35 Chapter 5 Description of Prototype ............................................................................43 5.1 Interactive Map Visualization ................................................................44 5.1.1Base Layer ...................................................................................45 5.1.2Annotation Layer.........................................................................46 5.2 Chat Module and Desktop Sharing ........................................................47 5.3 Hyperlinking...........................................................................................49 5.4 Mimio Interactive Whiteboard Application............................................50 5.5 Rapid Deployment..................................................................................53 Chapter 6 Methodology ..............................................................................................54 6.1 The Living Lab framework ....................................................................54 6.2 Research Design.....................................................................................58 v 6.3 Semi-structured interviews of domain-experts ......................................60 6.4 Procedures ...............................................................................................61 Chapter 7 Results and Analysis ..................................................................................63 7.1 Method of Analysis ................................................................................65 7.2 Discussion ..............................................................................................70 7.3 Implications for design............................................................................70 7.3.1Interactive Map Visualization........................................................70 7.3.2 Hyperlinking..................................................................................71 7.3.3 Communications............................................................................71 7.3.4 Whiteboard interaction..................................................................72 7.4 Implications for theory ............................................................................72 Chapter 8 Conclusion & Future Research ..................................................................74 8.1 Integrated and differentiated Transactive memory ................................75 8.2 Humans as soft sensors ..........................................................................77 8.3 Spatial Annotation and Mobile device support ......................................79 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................81 Appendix A Semi-structured interview Questions .....................................................90 Appendix B Illustrations of artifacts used in day-to-day planning and decision making ..................................................................................................................94 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1-1: Wegner’s analysis of the group mind: Transactive Memory ...................4 Figure 2-1: The NeoCITIES simulation and its various User-Interface (UI) components ...........................................................................................................12 Figure 3-1: Testing whether Ttransactive memory mediates the effectsof Training methods or Group performance (Moreland, R. L., Argote, L., & Krishnan, R. (1996)) ..................................................................................................................24 Figure 3-2: A multi-level representation of Organizational Memory. (Anand et. al . , 1998) suggest that transactive memory exists between the group level and the Organizational level in explaining group performance. .........................28 Figure 3-3: The Transactive Networks System (37 ) which builds a system to match knowledge requestors to knowledge providers. .........................................34 4-1: The nested transactive memory model (n-TM)....................................................38 Figure 4-2: A conceptualization of the transactive memory environment emphasizing roles and expertise. ..........................................................................40 Figure 5-1: Features of the NeoCITIES transactive memory system..........................43 Figure 5-2 : Base Layer of the Univeristy Park campus area constructed using the Mimio Notebook software .....................................................................................45 Figure 5-3: Annotations on the Base Layer linking to external information ..............46 Figure 5-4: Desktop Sharing of the map visualization on a host and a client using MSN Messenger ....................................................................................................48 Figure 5-5 The annotations on the base layer can be hyperlinked to 3d maps ...........49 Figure 5-6: Mimio inclues a sensor (a) that clips onto existing whiteboards to enable interaction with (b) digital markers ..........................................................52 Figure 6-1: The