IS mediation of emergency management: adding prediction to the existing framework of activities?

Fire poses a recurring threat to life and property in every society and common traditions of fire-fighting services and fire emergency management systems have developed over centuries. Such systems now comprise a repository of large datasets gathered from years of fire incidents. Motivated by the devastation caused by a recent major fire emergency in their jurisdiction, the M2inder project was initiated by a state-based fire emergency service organisation to develop a modelling tool using this and other datasets to probabilistically predict where and when fires are likely to occur. The contribution of study presents the findings from a participatory action research (PAR) study of the M2inder project when a team of both practitioners and researchers with varying expertise, was assembled to guide the development of the M2inder system.