Community crisis response teams: Leveraging local resources through ICT E-readiness

Dynamic community crisis response teams form quickly at the onset of a crisis providing assistance until external specialty resources arrive. FEMA recommends individual preparedness for up to 72 hours. Sustaining a community for at least 72 hours often falls to those who live or work in the community. Local community responders (i.e. small grassroots volunteers) who operate in the field during a crisis need mobile information technologies and practice for effective communication and coordination. Small grassroots volunteers, who may be among community responders, often have limited training and practice with two-way device quick response tactics. Our analysis of the local community literature suggests focusing on ICT training in conjunction with plain-language communication directed towards interoperability as a means to increase individual ICT e-readiness. We propose the use of team-based learning instructional strategy which has been empirically tested in the classroom.