CSCI306 Software Engineering
Spring 2010
Final Project
Request for Prototype
Submitted by: Disaster Management Research Team (DMRT)
Background:
According to researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder:
Contrary to what is often portrayed, local citizens are the true “first responders” in
emergency situations. Until professional response personnel arrive, citizens are
the first to perform rescues, administer first aid, and transport victims to hospitals.
Even after the response moves from an informal to a formal effort, sociological
research shows that citizens continue to self organize and provide ongoing
assistance by providing food, shelter, child care assistance, employment,
transportation, and so on [1]. Now, with the increasingly accessible Internet,
online forums have allowed people to cross geographical boundaries that
normally constrain the reach of crises to share information and coordinate citizenled efforts…[2]
DMRT has asked us to create a software program to allow them to track social
networking participation (e.g., Twitter posts) in local disasters. They have only a vague
idea of what they want, and they are hoping that our software engineers will be able to
develop a proof-of-concept program to help them figure out what would be most useful.
Project Description:
The staff at DMRT have suggested the following features for the program:
 It should display a grid or map that represents the affected area.
 As posts are received, markers should appear on the map indicating that there may
be important information regarding that location (e.g., a survivor is located, food
has been delivered, etc.)
 The user should be able to click on the marker and see the full text of the
message.
 It might be helpful if the marker icon changes when a message has been read.
 Messages might include date, time, location and priority as well as text.
 It’s possible that multiple messages could be received from the same location.
The program should be able to display a list of the messages sorted by time. If
possible, it would also be nice to have a list of messages in order by priority.
 Although not part of the scope of this project, the DMRT staff anticipate that they
might want to be able to get a log of messages, separate from the program with
the map. This could be useful, for example, to send to a cell phone which can
more easily deal with a text display.
1. Bartlett, J.G. Planning for avian influenza. Annals of Internal Medicine 145, 2 (2006);
www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/0000605-200607180-00133v1
2. L Palen, S Hiltz and S Liu, Online Forums Supporting Grassroots Participation in
Emergency Preparedness and Response, Communications of the ACM, March 2007, Vol
50 No 3.

Ultimately this software should receive input from a source such as twitter or text
messages or a cell phone application. For this prototype, users should have some
facility to type in messages. The software should be designed so that an actual
link to a source such as twitter could be added easily, with few changes to the
existing prototype.
1. Bartlett, J.G. Planning for avian influenza. Annals of Internal Medicine 145, 2 (2006);
www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/0000605-200607180-00133v1
2. L Palen, S Hiltz and S Liu, Online Forums Supporting Grassroots Participation in
Emergency Preparedness and Response, Communications of the ACM, March 2007, Vol
50 No 3.