# Coproduction as an Approach to Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management
## 4 Scenarios for Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in EM  
Based on the findings of the studies and the roles identified in the design case study, we can envision two scenarios where social and mobile computing could be used to support a coordinated action among EMAs and citizens: citizens as sources of information (that is citizens acting as sensors, trusted sensors, and nodes), and citizens acting as reactive or proactive agents able to perform specific  
Figure 1: Example of a question in the focus group about citizen roles. Figure 2: Understanding ways of participation through an ecology of participants. activities to improve the response to an incident. To describe the scenario we make use of a design artifact called crowd capabilities [44] that provides a basic scaffold to analyze how technology can support community substantive empowerment in EM. Each _crowd capability_ or scenario is described in terms of its _Structure_, _Content_, and _Processes_. The _Structure_ defines the sources of knowledge and the means they use to provide such knowledge; the _Contents_ are the specific organizational goals that should be met in that scenario; and the _Processes_ are the activities that have to be executed be able to integrate the potential crowd capabilities into the organization protocols. This description is only focused on technological issues, not on the organizational and cultural aspects that should be addressed to promote citizen participation and engagment in a coproduction scenario. Thus, each scenario compiles practices in mobile and social computing design that might be taken into account to support that integration. **Scenario 1: Citizens as information providers. ** This scenario helps EMAs to improve their response by making use of digital social capital as an information source and it also helps to increase the transparency of public agencies. Table 2 summarises the crowd capabilities for this scenario that are discussed below. As discussed previously, and identified in our empirical studies, to integrate citizen-generated content into the EM process data timeliness, validity and quality need to be ensured [9; 13]. It is not only a question of trust, for which authenticated trusted sensors can be used, but also a question of the quality of the information provided to support situational awareness and decision-making that only citizen-considered nodes are capable of providing. For example, in previous experiences, professional emergency workers stated that pictures and other multimedia items, like videos, are usually more informative that text descriptions which tend be imprecise and not always focused on the information that help them take decisions [32]. Filtering, data mining algorithms, and visualization can be applied to improve social media data access and interpretability [9; 40], but also being able to visually discriminate the credibility of the information source in map-based representations can help to take quicker decisions. The classification of roles here introduced can be used with that purpose as shown in Figure 3. As posited by [PERSON] et al, the tools that EM workers do not use on a daily basis will not be available on a crisis event [13], so operators needs mechanisms to classify social