Publication: Coproduction as an Approach to Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management
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2016-08-10
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MDPI
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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.
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Keywords
Citizen participation, Coproduction, Emergency management, Empowering technologies, Social and mobile computing
Bibliographic citation
Díaz, P., Carroll, J.M., Aedo, I. (2016). Coproduction as an Approach to Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management. Future Internet, 8 (3), 41.