Abstract
This paper examines the rapid and ad hoc development and interactions of participative citizen communities during acute events, using the examples of the 2011 floods in Queensland, Australia, and the global controversy surrounding Wikileaks and its spokesman, Julian Assange. The self-organising community responses to such events which can be observed in these cases bypass or leapfrog, at least temporarily, most organisational or administrative hurdles which may otherwise frustrate the establishment of online communities; they fast-track the processes of community development and structuration. By understanding them as a form of rapid prototyping, e-democracy initiatives can draw important lessons from observing the community activities around such acute events.
Highlights
The Australian state of Queensland received an unprecedented amount of rainfall during December 2010 and January 2011, resulting in widespread flooding across large areas – a flood emergency was declared for half of the Queensland territory, with an area the size of France and Germany combined estimated to be under water
The joint effort by the southeast Queensland community to respond to the flood threat, and the overwhelming response by local and even interstate residents to calls for cleanup volunteers was not or predominantly a result of the social media activities which we have described here, – the authorities’ efforts to manage the crisis through other media played an important, and most probably more important, part
In the case of the Queensland floods, while the Queensland Police Service was able to use Facebook to post more detailed and complex messages about the current situation, it was Twitter with its far more basic communicative infrastructure – where public messages are inherently accessible to all users, and hashtags can be used as a simple and effective tool for conducting a collective discussion even without a need for users to be followers of one another – which was substantially more useful for disseminating these messages
Summary
What technological tools and organisational processes are found to be useful and valuable there may be able to be adopted and adapted to these initiatives’ own needs; the participation and conduct of official actors as part of the wider community can be critically reviewed, and may provide insight for the further fine-tuning of the social media engagement strategies that are in use in such institutions; some e-democracy projects may even be able to structure their overall operations around a series of scheduled ‘acute events’ (for example highlighting particular themes and topics) that attract specific groups of participants, rather than providing an open-ended space for discussion and deliberation that is functional but provides its potential users with little reason for why they should address any one specific topic at any one given time With these intentions, the following discussion will examine two recent acute events: the 2010/11 Queensland flood crisis, and the (continuing) controversy around WikiLeaks and its founder and spokesman, Julian Assange. These events differ in a number of key elements – underlying themes, geographic reach, temporal dynamics, the involvement of government agencies and other institutions, etc. –, but both provide vital pointers for e-democracy projects
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