Improving Emergency Plans through Public Engagement

Abstract

Emergency plans are fundamental for the speedy and effective response in disaster situations. Plans are often constructed by teams of experts, who apply their knowledge to define response procedures, but lack part of location-specific knowledge that can be very relevant to make decisions during responses. Such knowledge is, however, in the minds of people who use those spaces every day, but are not involved in the planning processes. In this paper, we advocate for citizens' involvement in emergency plan elaboration via Public Participation, a mechanism long time used in other areas of e-government. We define a process for the elicitation of citizen's knowledge via public participation, and present the results of a study on its potential impact, where individuals used different collaborative tools to volunteer knowledge to be used in emergency plan improvement.