prepare - experience - learn

All participants will work together throughout the 2014 ISCRAM Summer School at the Tilburg University campus in lectures, workshops, exercises and tutorials, while growing towards a final 2-day game, which will be played at Campus Vesta, Ranst, Belgium.
To prepare for this game, participants will have the opportunity to join one of two teams that will interact throughout the 2014 ISCRAM Summer School: Game Development and Disaster Response. The game developers will focus on enhancing the game to achieve learning and improve resilience. The disaster responders will work on improving and combining their tools, procedures, approaches and models to be ready for the challenges of the game. Together, both teams will have a unique opportunity to work on new approaches for decision support and sensemaking for disaster resilience.
At the 2014 ISCRAM Summer School, participants will work on the following tasks:
Just as the participants, the Lecturers are hand picked by the directors of the 2014 ISCRAM Summer School. Each lecturer will also be invited to submit a lecture note, which will be provided to the participants of the summer school. We are still working on the program for 2014 and will update you as soon as possible.
Lecturers of the 2014 ISCRAM Summer Schools include:
To prepare for this game, participants will have the opportunity to join one of two teams that will interact throughout the 2014 ISCRAM Summer School: Game Development and Disaster Response. The game developers will focus on enhancing the game to achieve learning and improve resilience. The disaster responders will work on improving and combining their tools, procedures, approaches and models to be ready for the challenges of the game. Together, both teams will have a unique opportunity to work on new approaches for decision support and sensemaking for disaster resilience.
At the 2014 ISCRAM Summer School, participants will work on the following tasks:
- analyse and discuss challenges in humanitarian crisis situations with a focus on the role of information and supply chain management in crises;
- actively participate in the game and role playing;
- hands on use, critically analyze, and improve approaches and tools for decision support and sensemaking in disaster response.
Just as the participants, the Lecturers are hand picked by the directors of the 2014 ISCRAM Summer School. Each lecturer will also be invited to submit a lecture note, which will be provided to the participants of the summer school. We are still working on the program for 2014 and will update you as soon as possible.
Lecturers of the 2014 ISCRAM Summer Schools include:
Luk Van Wassenhove is Henry Ford Chair in Manufacturing at INSEAD and Academic Director of the INSEAD Humanitarian Research Group. The Research Group has worked for a dozen years in close collaboration with many humanitarian organisations and private companies on a large number of pressing issues. It has gathered expertise in areas like disaster preparedness and response, collaboration and public/private partnerships, and asset (fleet) management.
Humanitarian Logistics: Quo Vadis? In this session we start with a sense of urgency. The humanitarian case load is increasing but funding decreases. Unless the humanitarian world learns how to work effectively with other players like private companies and the military, they won’t be able to cope. However, selecting, managing and evaluating partnerships is tough and stakeholders in these partnerships have strongly diverging cultures and objectives. We shall discuss stakeholders as well as partnerships from a practical perspective, illustrating challenges and opportunities with real cases. Furthermore, operational problems require much better resolution. A simple example is that humanitarian organizations poorly use the critical assets they need to do their jobs (e.g. their fleet of vehicles). Many also rather poorly prepare for disasters. Urban disasters are on the rise but most humanitarian organizations’ experience is in rural areas. Well-known phenomena like convergence (of people, goods and information) to a big disaster site are poorly studied. Unsolicited donations are a huge problem in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe but the humanitarian world does not really know how to effectively deal with them. These are just a few examples of topics which will be discussed, based on our research experience. |
Andrej Verity is a seasoned disaster responder and information management officer with UN-OCHA. He has been working in the information management discipline for 15 years with the last 10 focused in the humanitarian arena. Andrej has responded in-person to several major sudden on-set emergencies in the past 5 years including the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2010 Pakistan floods, and the 2013 Philippines typhoon.
When not responding, Andrej has been a catalyst in helping to bring the efforts of the Volunteer & Technical Community (V&TC) to the formal humanitairan sector including the co-founding of the Digital Humanitarian Network. Andrej has also been instrumental in driving forward the thematic concepts of Decision Makers Needs and Impact Evaluation. You can keep up with Andrej's forward-thinking on his persona blog: http://blog.veritythink.com/. Andrej will discuss with you about the involvement of V&TCs in the OCHA information management, and the Philippines IM response for OCHA & DHNetwork. |
Jonas Landgren (PhD) is Assistant Professor, Department of Applied IT, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Jonas' research is focused on HCI and interaction design in the area of emergency and societal crisis response. The research is action-oriented and design-driven with a clear objective to improve the design of information technology for professional practitioners in this domain.
Topic 1: Monitoring and describing emerging and dynamic events: Is it possible to establish a multi-agency common operating picture? This session will describe the challenges of creating and maintaining a comprehensive understanding in multi-agency collaboration during emerging events. Based on ethnographical field studies, patterns of practice, tools and approaches will be presented to illustrate and discuss these challenges. The take-away will be that establishing multi-agency common operating picture is dependent on an evolved social practice rather than sophisticated information technology. Topic 2: Design workshop: Human Centered Design This session will present the HCD-toolkit as a relevant approach when striving to innovate or improve organizations and people’s capabilities to organize different types of response work. The session will consist of an introduction to the method and an extensive workshop session where the attendees work on a practical and important case. |
Benefits from attending
Both PhD students and practitioners will benefit from interactions with a dedicated mentor and iterative feedback from some of the best researchers in their domain and experienced practitioners with knowledge from the field, as well as from their peers. PhD students will have the opportunity to earn ECTS credits for their courses. We will keep you posted about this on this page. Practitioners are in particular invited to consider the DRL summer school as an opportunity to explore, test and validate tools and methods that they are using or would like to further develop in the future.
Disaster in My Backyard
You will have a unique learning experience by exploring the theory of game design, information and supply chain management in humanitarian crisis response - and testing your own approaches and the insights gained during the Summer School in the final augmented reality game. If you are interested in the results of the Summerschool, we invite you to register as observers to the final game, to be played on August 19, 2014. |
Lecture Notes
A dedicated 2014 ISCRAM Summer School publications volume in the Springer Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing is prepared, to which we invite lecturers and all participants to submit a contribution. PhD student papers are required to present valid, original, relevant cutting edge research that will be reviewed to the highest academic standards. Reviewing will pay additional attention to the application of the related scientific literature and theory, to the use of an appropriate research methodology, and to technical, mathematical and statistical correctness. Insight papers written by practitioners provide the opportunity to integrate and discuss best practices, standards, challenges and requirements that arise in practice in the light of the theoretical considerations provided by the academic researchers.
Interested? Find out more about how to register!
A dedicated 2014 ISCRAM Summer School publications volume in the Springer Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing is prepared, to which we invite lecturers and all participants to submit a contribution. PhD student papers are required to present valid, original, relevant cutting edge research that will be reviewed to the highest academic standards. Reviewing will pay additional attention to the application of the related scientific literature and theory, to the use of an appropriate research methodology, and to technical, mathematical and statistical correctness. Insight papers written by practitioners provide the opportunity to integrate and discuss best practices, standards, challenges and requirements that arise in practice in the light of the theoretical considerations provided by the academic researchers.
Interested? Find out more about how to register!
experiences from past ISCRAM Summer schools
Since its inception, more than 140 students from over 25 different countries and 50 lecturers from international universities and organisations have participated in the ISCRAM Summer School. Previous editions of the Summer School were consistently rated very highly by the participants.
Some Testimoninals
“The summer school was one of the most encouraging thing that happened during my doctoral studies. I got to meet people with the same interest in crisis management, either techies or people oriented, but all sharing this same passion. Gathering students, academics and professionals from everywhere, all driven "to make a difference", no wonder the atmosphere was just "AAA" and the exchanges were outstanding. I know it's sometimes hard to organize the time and money for a summer school during your PhD, but my advice is...fight for it, it's worth it! “
“If you study humanitarian issues from a purely academic point of view, the Summer School is a great opportunity to expand your outlook and get a sense of how the actual humanitarian practice looks/feels like. This thanks to the highly experienced practitioners invited to the Summer School to give talks and also to some practitioners that enroll to the Summer School... Don’t worry, you’ll also find academicians there :P “
“If you are into crisis management and open for new ideas, other perspectives and curious what others do, you definitely should join the summer school. The talks are one aspect but more important is your story. And all the other stories from other participants. What are they doing? And why? What problems do you have, whether in academia or in the field. Just by bringing all the interested people together will start so many discussions and will give new insights, new solutions, etc., which you will never experience by staying where you are. For almost ten days you will be “trapped” by/in this group. It forces you to think in a different way. But at the end of every day a fantastic dinner and Belgium/Dutch beer waits”
“The summer school was one of the most encouraging thing that happened during my doctoral studies. I got to meet people with the same interest in crisis management, either techies or people oriented, but all sharing this same passion. Gathering students, academics and professionals from everywhere, all driven "to make a difference", no wonder the atmosphere was just "AAA" and the exchanges were outstanding. I know it's sometimes hard to organize the time and money for a summer school during your PhD, but my advice is...fight for it, it's worth it! “
“If you study humanitarian issues from a purely academic point of view, the Summer School is a great opportunity to expand your outlook and get a sense of how the actual humanitarian practice looks/feels like. This thanks to the highly experienced practitioners invited to the Summer School to give talks and also to some practitioners that enroll to the Summer School... Don’t worry, you’ll also find academicians there :P “
“If you are into crisis management and open for new ideas, other perspectives and curious what others do, you definitely should join the summer school. The talks are one aspect but more important is your story. And all the other stories from other participants. What are they doing? And why? What problems do you have, whether in academia or in the field. Just by bringing all the interested people together will start so many discussions and will give new insights, new solutions, etc., which you will never experience by staying where you are. For almost ten days you will be “trapped” by/in this group. It forces you to think in a different way. But at the end of every day a fantastic dinner and Belgium/Dutch beer waits”