# Coproduction as an Approach to Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management
## 1 Introduction
For example, when the government of Belgium imposed a security lockdown on Brussels on 21 November 2015 due to a potential threat of terrorist attacks, the police asked the population to not share information about their activities in social networks. Citizens started to spontaneously use the hashtag #BrusselsLockdown to post pictures of cats and this practice became a trending topic not only in Belgium, as citizens from other countries joined this initiative to try to avoid terrorist getting access strategic information through social networks. Citizens have motivations to co-produce in an emergency situation, whether for sheer rational egoism [18] or due to their social connectedness with the affected community or to an altruistic behavior motivated by sympathy with the victims [17]. From the government point of view, service coproduction should not be regarded as an option but as a way to improve public services and make them more sustainable by focusing not only of what people need but also on what people can do [19]. Indeed, [PERSON] introduced the concept of coproduction when analyzing the case of the Chicago police, whose decision to move from foot to car patrols derived in an increase in the crime rate due to the lack of contact with the neighbors so that they did not take profit from the citizens skills and informal knowledge of the street. As posited by [PERSON] in her influential book \"The Death and Life of Great American Cities\" [20], streets are safer when the neighbors live in them and take an active role keeping an eye on what happens on them. This kind of asset cannot be ignored by the service providers, but needs to be integrated in a partnership effort, that is, into a coproduction service. Coproduction services have been promoted in areas like health, education, or urban planning [18; 19], but they could also be applied to EM in order to incorporate citizens as valuable resources and not only as recipients of help. However, for that to be possible EMAS need to identify ways to involve citizenswithout interfering with their protocols and responsibilities. The work reported on this paper uses the coproduction concept as the lens through which contribute to theory building about participatory EM services envisioned as a partnership relationship with citizens. In Section 2, we review the conceptual foundations to move to a coproduction service in EM. Section 3 introduces a design case study that, after analyzing the current situation and expectations of EM professionals about citizen participation through empirical studies with EM professionals, shaped the crowd of citizens as a heterogeneous set of roles whose skills and capacities could contribute to move to a coproductive EM. The identification of such roles, including sensors, nodes, and agents, was done through a participatory process based on focus groups with different EMAs. Such roles helped to identify scenarios where ubiquitous and social computing could make EM participatory, and yet appropriate from the point of view of EMAs. Roles contribute to theory-building on the implementation of EM as a coproduction service by providing an abstract mechanism to envision the skills and capabilities citizens can bring to make EM more participatory, yet efficient.