The premise of building capacity for community resilience means rethinking standard practices in
emergency management training and operations to include a wider group of actors at the
community level. This means engaging organizations from different sectors and jurisdictions in a
collective effort to coordinate action to reduce risk of disaster that is shared across geographic
regions. This need for coordination across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries takes on
special urgency in the complex, adaptive sociotechnical systems of regional emergency readiness,
response, and resilience. A reliable and trusted knowledge center can support cognition and
communication of a common operational picture: a critical task in realizing effective
interorganizational emergency resource coordination. We present the initial stage of a prototype
decision support system to inform emergency response resource allocation strategies in Allegheny
County, Pennsylvania. This design uses geospatial modeling to map existing and potential
resource allocation scenarios in relation to various types of risks. Vetted and endorsed by
experienced practicing emergency mangers in the county, the prototype decision support system
shows promise for catalyzing interorganizational and interjurisdictional resource coordination by
providing a unified, regional emergency management resource knowledge base.