We cannot train for all future disasters and challenges, but we must be able to respond to them. Organizations need agile Command, Control and Coordination frameworks that support a rising real-time flow of information and visualization. Decision makers and their teams are increasingly likely to be geographically distributed and composed of members of different organizations. One inherent problem is the limitation on sharing and visualizing time-critical information due to current informational boundaries. A new approach to emergency and incident management would enable members of allied and distributed organizations (such as police, army, firefighters, etc) and even civilians to provide geo-tagged streams of video, images and data on-demand from wherever it's needed, gathering timely and filtering information while the system maintains existing informational boundaries.

The authors' research focuses on the design of an Edge Decision Support Framework (EDSF) and a Common Synthetic Environment Service (CSES) that provides shared awareness to a distributed group of users who operate as a team in a "synthetic" Command Center. The situational awareness provided by the CSES can be updated in near-real time using existing intelligence sources supplemented by the EDSF's additional crowdsourced information and media sourced from a wider network of people. Social networking has demonstrated both benefits and limits to crowdsourced information. This paper addresses various issues including security, bandwidth and network reliability challenges and illustrates the potential for an approach that enables civilian and defense services to cooperate through web and mobile applications. Shared real-time situational awareness can be accelerated by supporting a wider network of people on the ground gathering timely information and then controlling the bandwidth used in obtaining it. The outcome of this approach is to gather and aggregate more data and relevant media faster to enable organizations to respond and co-operate in an agile manner.

The authors' research also focuses on the concept, design and development of an integrated platform that can be used for training through operations and is suited to supporting Civil-Military Cooperation through its mechanisms for crowdsourced situational awareness and Command and Control supporting remote collaboration. The intent is to improve the readiness, speed and level of an agile response to critical events needed to enable a more effective global force.