This article explores the materiality of disaster politics through the practice of mapping during the 2007 wildfires in Southern California. It examines the process of production of two different maps, the maps produced by San Diego County and a popular Google My Map created by local media and academic institutions, in order to explore how an unfolding disaster comes to be understood. This article argues that the interplay between different technological and human entities to produce each map in turn produced different spaces of disaster in ways that challenged priorities of disaster preparedness and response. Specifically, the different mapping practices in 2007 produced different relationships to temporality, boundaries and responsibility, making different aspects of the disaster visible while constructing different threats and definitions of danger. They juxtaposed representational and relational knowledge as well as the value of prevention and demonstration. This article draws on data collected through textual analysis of government and scientific documents as well as interviews and observations of key actors, their mapping practices, and sociotechnological networks.times maps were used to aid inter-agency and public communication during a wildfire response. Yet over the course of the wildfires, there was a profound disconnect between what could be known and what could be represented at any given moment creating a space of uncertainty. The scale of these unknowns helped transform the flames into a disaster.In order to explore the materiality of disaster politics, this article considers two attempts to make sense of the 2007 wildfires through mapping. Specifically, I examine the production of maps created by San Diego County's Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and a Google My Map (Figure 1) created by an ad-hoc group started by a public media outlet, KPBS, and San Diego State University (SDSU). I argue that the socio-technical practices involved in making these maps produced two different spaces of disaster. The different ways of encountering the burning space had consequences for how priorities in planning and response were determined, including questioning what qualifies as valued information, challenging the authority of jurisdictional boundaries and formal procedures, and establishing different time scales for action. Thus, this article asks: how did the different practices of mapping these wildfires produce different spaces of disaster? What was at stake epistemically and politically in the various mapping strategies employed?Consider, for instance, how the fire perimeter for one of the fires, dubbed the Harris Fire, was drawn as it burnt through a less populated area to cross the San Diego County border into Mexico. The county maps (Figure 2) showed the fire perimeter ending with a straight line along the border, ending the space of the disaster at the edge of the county's responsibility to protect, excluding a section of the people affected by the flames and smoke. The ad-hoc map (Figure 1) Figure 1: Th...

Abstract-In this position paper, we argue that an entirely new methodological paradigm and software platform is required for developing citizen-oriented social computing applications. The platform that we propose is based on the idea of 'Collective Intelligence as a Service', and is grounded in the formalisation of computational models derived from an empirical analysis of psychological processes and social practices. This in turn provides the enablers for developing radically innovative tools for computational sustainability and computer-supported collective action for Smart(er) Cities. The proposal is illustrated with two exemplars, one a healthcare application for patients with peripheral arterial disease; and the other an application for collaborative energy conservation to meet targets set out in a city's Sustainable Energy Action Plan.

This paper presents the components and integrated outcome of a system that aims to achieve early detection, monitoring and mitigation of pandemic outbreaks. The architecture of the platform aims at providing a number of pandemic-response-related services, on a modular basis, that allows for the easy customization of the platform to address user’s needs per case. This customization is achieved through its ability to deploy only the necessary, loosely coupled services and tools for each case, and by providing a common authentication, data storage and data exchange infrastructure. This way, the platform can provide the necessary services without the burden of additional services that are not of use in the current deployment (e.g., predictive models for pathogens that are not endemic to the deployment area). All the decisions taken for the communication and integration of the tools that compose the platform adhere to this basic principle. The tools presented here as well as their integration is part of the project STAMINA.

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This article examines the production of a highly referenced yet unofficial Google map made during the 2007 wildfires in Southern California to track the unfolding disaster in order to explore how, under duress of disaster, diverse actors and technologies interact to produce mutually legitimate ways of knowing that disaster. Drawing on informal interviews of key actors in the production of the map as well as textual analysis of government and scientific documents regarding the wildfires, I explore the improvisational practices that took shape in order to better understand how diverse voices, often non-authoritative ones, become part of the collective knowledge of that disaster. Engaging with visual culture studies, critical geography and science and technology studies, I expand upon the complexity of the relationship between representation and world, and argue that no single person, technology, or environmental factor was in control of the mapping practice. I find that the legitimacy and value of the map is to be found in the ad-­‐hoc and often problematic interactions that produced the map, where wildfire expertise is not located in a specific training or position in society, but distributed over the network of interactions. Analyzing the relationship between representational practice and knowledge in this way, I argue, can help make visible how valued forms of knowledge were not determined a priori to the wildfires or map, but came into being along with the map.