Abstract
Social and mobile computing open up new possibilities for integrating citizens’ information, knowledge, and social capital in emergency management (EM). This participation can improve the capacity of local agencies to respond to unexpected events by involving citizens not only as first line informants, but also as first responders. This participation could contribute to build resilient communities aware of the risks they are threatened by and able to mobilize their social capital to cope with them and, in turn, decrease the impact of threats and hazards. However for this participation to be possible organizations in charge of EM need to realize that involving citizens does not interfere with their protocols and that citizens are a valuable asset that can contribute to the EM process with specific skills and capabilities. In this paper we discuss the design challenges of using social and mobile computing to move to a more participatory EM process that starts by empowering both citizens and organizations in a coproduction service envisioned as a partnership effort. As an example, we describe a case study of a participatory design approach that involved professional EM workers and decision makers in an effort to understand the challenges of using technology-based solutions to integrate citizen skills and capabilities in their operation protocols. The case study made it possible to identify specific roles that citizens might play in a crisis or disaster and to envision scenarios were technologies could be used to integrate their skills into the EM process. In this way the paper contributes to the roles and the scenarios of theory-building about coproduction in EM services.
Highlights
The combination of social and mobile computing has raised many expectations about the capability of these technologies to promote a more active participation of citizens in different areas of the public sphere on the assumption that they offer a powerful and widely available communication and collaboration channel that can be used for self-reporting, self-organizing, and supporting remote participation in events and tasks [1]
In this work we focus on the citizen-to-government interaction with a view to exploring the role that social and mobile computing might play to turn citizen participation into a valuable asset when emergency management (EM ) is conceived as a coproduction service
We describe a design case study that shows how citizen roles and capabilities were identified in the context of a project aimed at using social and mobile computing to increase citizen participation in EM [32]
Summary
The combination of social and mobile computing has raised many expectations about the capability of these technologies to promote a more active participation of citizens in different areas of the public sphere on the assumption that they offer a powerful and widely available communication and collaboration channel that can be used for self-reporting, self-organizing, and supporting remote participation in events and tasks [1]. Citizens post information on social networks, like Twitter or Facebook, and organize groups to express emotions or to share concerns [5,6]. Map-based web sites, like Ushaidi or OpenStreetMap, are spontaneously used by citizens to share geolocated crisis information [7,10,11]. How this crowd intelligence can be further integrated into the decision-making process of agencies is still an open question [5,9], since professional emergency managers and decision-makers need to rely upon timely and accurate information and citizen-generated content might not fit these criteria [5,9,12,13]
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