Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management: Balancing Social Capital and Efficacy

Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management: Balancing Social Capital and Efficacy

연구 분야: Strategies

학회: IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

Integrating citizens into Emergency Management can make the process more efficient and communities more resilient. The rise of mobile and social computing has paved the way to ideate participatory platforms that can be accessed everywhere to facilitate collaboration and cooperation. However, it is a design challenge to balance the needs of the authorities, who are responsible for managing the crisis, with the capabilities of citizens, a challenge that depends also on many organizational and cultural issues. In this paper we summarize the experience of more than one decade of work in envisioning technologies to integrate citizens in the Emergency Management process, technologies that aim at respecting the needs and expectations of the involved agencies whilst taking profit from the valuable social capital of individuals and communities. Drawing on the outcomes of several projects, we examine the contribution of coproduction to exploit social capital, the value of participatory and action research approaches to understand better the needs of different stakeholders, and the role of gamification and emotional affordances to enhance civic engagement.