Requirements and open issues for ISs supporting dynamic community bonding in emergency situations

Studies show that in emergency situations, like in the aftermath of natural disasters, people tend to self-organize into so-called ephemeral organizations and transitional communities based on common problems, common places, etc. Strict interactions among victims, fundamental to strengthen such small communities, may be efficiently supported by a new generation of mobile-empowered disaster management systems based on the social networking approach, with crowd-generated and geo-referenced data. In this paper we discuss how a shift of perspective in the interaction, conceptual, logical and physical models adopted for the social network can efficiently support the dynamic bonding/de-bonding/re-bonding of communities that emerge based on alliances around shared problems and/or objectives.