Knowledge Management in a Volunteer Community at the Time of Disaster

On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake struck northeastern Japan and triggered the devastating tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster. A number of IT engineers collaborated and launched websites and web services to assist the victims immediately the quake. One of the major websites was sinsai.info in which hundreds of volunteers participated. Even though the sinsai.info project was the loosely coupled volunteer community, it rapidly solved numerous unanticipated problems which occurred one after another in the project. This paper aims to clarify the reason why people collaborated efficiently and solved the problems quickly even in the loosely coupled community. We analyzed communication logs in the community from the aspect of knowledge management. We discovered the important role of communication channels in knowledge management.