Aftermath: Infrastructure, Resources, and Organizational Adaptation in the Wake of Disaster

Abstract

Informal and emergent organizations play a vital role in disaster response, and are a central concern to crisis informatics. Prior research in the field has tended to focus on the activities of individual organizations during periods of disaster. Though unsurprising, this focus has led to limited understanding of the origins and long-term trajectories of these organizations or their participation in broader networks of informal response, whose individual membership, ideologies, and practices are often fluid and overlapping. In this paper, we examine the activities of informal organizations that mobilized in response to the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 participants, we identify five categories of resources - funding, people, information, skills, and shared values - that these organizations mobilized to sustain themselves and continue their activities long after the immediate disaster abated. We contribute insights into the adaptation decisions of emergent organizations, guidance in understanding these decisions in relation to their social and historical context, and considerations for how long-term, network-oriented studies can help address some of the contemporary challenges in crisis-informatics research.