This ethnographic study reveals how expertise was sought, articulated and actuated across online and offline worlds to enable the evacuation of 38 horses from an isolated ranch in the mountainous region of Northern Colorado following a series of devastating flash floods in September 2013. The shared expertise within a loosely connected community of practice bridged spatial-temporal limitations and afforded opportunities for practical assistance and response, both virtually and on the ground. Interaction via social media articulated the parameters of the emergent problem to be solved, and "cast a net" to find the expertise necessary to address different aspects of the perceived problem. Eventually, more than 60 people with equine expertise converged onto the ranch, bringing their materials to execute a single-day evacuation and relocation of the herd.

This ethnographic study of a Facebook Page founded on 28 October 2012 in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy's US landfall reveals how on-line pet advocates--a large but loosely organized social movement--mobilized their ad hoc discretionary activities to more cooperative, organized work to assist numerous displaced pets. The investigation shows how innovations around 'crossposting' to create a more persistent form of visual data management were important. It describes how these innovations produced an improvised case management system around which members of the pet-advocacy crowd could collectively work to help displaced pets. The paper connects to the CSCW and organizational science literature to consider how this emergent community articulated work and structured the mission of the Page.

Many things influence human decision-making in disasters. This work considers the information management needs and collaborative work of those focused on animal care and evacuation in disasters. Empirical ethnographic work on-site at two animal evacuation locations, as well as fieldwork responding to large animal needs, and ongoing participant observer fieldwork between events has led to both academic and practical contributions aimed at improving the ways animal advocates, animal owners and emergency responders are able to communicate and attend to the needs of animals and their owners in a disaster.

We examine the public, social media communications of 110 emergency medical response teams and organizations in the immediate aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. We found the teams through an inductive analysis of Twitter communications acquired over the three-week emergency period from 89,114 Twitterers. We then analyzed the teams' Twitter streams, as well as all digital media they generated and pointed to in their streams - blog posts, photographs, videos, status updates and field reports - to understand the medical coordination challenges they faced from pre-deployment readiness to on-the-ground action. Here we identify opportunities for improving coordination in a decentralized and distributed environment where staffing, disease trajectories, and other circumstances rapidly change. We extrapolate from these findings to theorize about how "beaconing" behavior is a sign of latent potential for coordination upon which mechanisms of coordination can capitalize.