Emergency Ethics, Law, Policy & IT Innovation in Crises

Ethics, law, and policy are cornerstones for effective IT innovation in crisis response and management. While many researchers and practitioners recognise this, it can be hard to find good resources for circumspect innovation approaches. This paper reviews The Library of Essays on Emergency Ethics, Law and Policy (2013), a four Volume series edited by Tom D. Campbell, that presents a collection of 113 seminal articles and chapters on emergency ethics, law and policy, and emergency research ethics. Building on a selective summary overview of each volume, the authors draw out core themes and discuss their relevance to research concerned with the design and use of intelligent systems for crisis response and management. The series brings together important insights for information system design and organizational innovation, but there is a lack of attention to socio-technical dimensions of emergency response and management. The authors conclude by discussing research within ISCRAM and the related fields of science and technology studies and IT Ethics, showing that entering into a conversation would be highly productive.