Issues in Disaster Communications

Abstract

The Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11th, 2011 caused severe damage to the northern coast of the main island in Japan. Since then we have been working to help out the affected area in terms of IT support such as internetworking and providing PCs. Through our support activities we came across an interesting issue concerning collaboration with people from heterogeneous backgrounds. We call this problem disaster communications. In this paper we report our experiences during our support activities and our findings as well as some issues and our current work.