Trust Issues in Disaster Communications

The Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11
^th
, 2011 caused severe damage to the northern coast of the main island in Japan. Since then we have been working to help out the affected area in terms of IT support such as internetworking and providing PCs. Through our support activities we came across an interesting issue concerning collaboration with people from heterogeneous backgrounds. We call this problem disaster communications in this paper. We found that trust plays an important role in such communications. In this paper we report our experiences during our support activities and our findings.