A Framework for Citizen e-Participation in Disaster Management

Guido Lang

Agenda

Problem Literature Solution

What works best when?

Agenda

Problem Literature Solution

“Social media support critical information distribution activity among members of the public that […] needs to be better

integrated with official disaster response activities.”

(Palen, 2008: 78)

(Carver, 2003)

(Phang & Kankanhalli, 2008)

(Kumar & Vragov, 2009)

Agenda

Problem Literature Solution

(after Rowe, 2005)

Proposed Morphology

Methodology

Qualitative comparative case analysis(Ragin, 1987)

Reduce case studies to variables of conditions and outcomes for further analysis(Rihoux, 2006)

e-Participation morphology presents one way to model the conditional variables

Case Studies

Virginia Tech Tragedy

Citizen e-Participation

Contributions by members of VT network were treated with a sense of authority

Group administrator was continuously engaged

Discussion board was used for free-text entry

Group reached agreement through deliberation

(Vieweg et al., 2008; Palen et al., 2007)

Corresponding Morphotype

Britain Blizzard

Citizen e-Participation

Everyone was able to contribute equally

Users were left on their own Highly formalized response Automated aggregation of information

Corresponding Morphotype

Discussion & Conclusion

Both cases represent successful instances of citizen e-participation in disaster situations

They differ in their respective e-participation mechanism and disaster context

It appears that level of task complexity is related to key variables of e-participation mechanism

Proposed morphology is a first step to understand what works best when

References

Carver, S. (2003). The Future of Participatory Approaches Using Geographic Information: developing a research agenda for the 21st century. URISA Journal, 15(APA 1), 61-71.

Kumar, N., & Vragov, R. (2009). Active Citizen Participation Using ICT Tools. Communications of the ACM, 52(1), 118-121.

Palen, L. (2008). Online Social Media in Crisis Events. Educause Quarterly, (3), 76-78.

Palen, L., Vieweg, S., Sutton, J., Liu, S. B., & Hughes, A. (2007). Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a Networked World. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on e-Social Science. Ann Arbor, MI.

Phang, C. W., & Kankanhalli, A. (2008). A Framework of ICT Exploitation for E-Participation Initiatives. Communications of the ACM, 51(12), 128-132.

Rowe, G. (2005). A Typology of Public Engagement Mechanisms. Science, Technology & Human Values, 30(2), 251-290.

Ragin, C. C. (1987). The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA.

Rihoux, B. (2006). Qualitative comparative analysis (qca) and related systematic comparative methods: recent advances and remaining challenges for social science research. International Sociology, 21(5), 679-706.

Vieweg, S., Palen, L., Liu, S. B., Hughes, A. L., & Sutton, J. (2008). Collective Intelligence in Disaster: Examination of the Phenomenon in the Aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech Shooting. In F. Fiedrich & B. Van De Walle, Proceedings of the 5th International ISCRAM Conference (pp. 44-54). Washington, DC.