This volume is the PhD dissertation of the author at the University of Siegen, and it falls into the broad thread of organizational aspects in computer-supported cooperative work from the 1980s. It refers also largely, in nontechnical terms, to the concept of shared information infrastructures. It introduces the concept of “publics” to cover the federation of individuals in the usage and discovery of unknown issues in information infrastructures, with attached social-technical aspects.

The main research question is stated to be dealing with the design principles for information and communication technologies (ICT) tools for cooperative contexts within emerging socio-technical information infrastructures:

What are the design challenges and characteristics of ICT tools that support the analysis of an integrated and interconnected information infrastructure, its information, type of users, evolving portfolio of systems as well as infrastructuring practices?

The case domain is crisis management, with its emergent citizen groups, and some IT support for citizens during crisis management; no specifics are given other than pointers to three research projects and general remarks spread over several chapters. It does not address the crucial aspects of communications resilience and coverage, emergency plans, information flows from and to victims from emergency services, and sociopsychological handling, in which social network analysis, data fusion, and crowd sensing are predominant [1,2].

As to be expected from a thesis, the volume is organized into (1) fundamentals, (2) collected findings from deskwork and some general case aspects, and (3) conclusions. The exposition is heavy on a wide variety of academic methodologies, references, and comparison of contributions in the literature. Part 2 is itself a collection of already-published articles. There are 31 pages of references.

Some simple approaches used in the cases are described, such as brainwriting cards, a web-based client-server application to capture and assign people’s physical and digital activities to specific situations, surveys, questionnaires, and the analysis of tweet traffic during a river flood.

In the conclusions, many very generic challenges identified from the literature and cases are listed. The ability of the simple tools to address the challenges is analyzed. The main outcome is to highlight the importance of integrating objective and subjective insights into the location-specific activities of people, as well as the subjective nature of information quality.

This thesis may serve as reference material for students and researchers in computer-supported cooperative work and in human-computer interaction, but it is distinct from the wide body of ongoing developments and deployments in social networks, ad hoc information networks, and related data mining capabilities or tools. A key issue, which has not been dealt with in the dissertation, is scalability versus information, users, and nodes.