# Coproduction as an Approach to Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management
## 1 Introduction  
The combination of social and mobile computing has raised many expectations about the capability of these technologies to promote a more active participation of citizens in different areas of the public sphere on the assumption that they offer a powerful and widely available communication and collaboration channel that can be used for self-reporting, self-organizing, and supporting remote participation in events and tasks [1]. The possibility of sharing and collaborating without time and space constraints can been exploited to improve government action and situational awareness, not only in terms of having a deeper understanding of the situation and its possible evolution as defined by [PERSON] [2], but also enhancing awareness about the citizens' social capital, and their knowledge and skills, or what is sometimes called the _wisdom of the crowd_. Indeed, technologies like web sites, wikis and social networks are used with more or less impact in many governmental agencies to promote a more transparent administration and, at the same time, try to engage citizens in civicissues like city planning and e-government [1; 3]. Disaster and emergency management is another domain where the use of social and mobile computing might make it possible to take profit from that _wisdom of the crowd_, taking into account that citizens are the first responders in any catastrophic situation affecting their community [4]. Map-based and social technologies have been proposed to support citizen journalism and communications citizen-to-citizen and government-to-citizen [5; 6; 7; 8]. Whenever a crisis happens, citizens post information on social networks, like Twitter or Facebook, and organize groups to express emotions or to share concerns [5; 6]. For example, in the European floods of 2013, [PERSON] et al. report the creation of 157 Facebook groups in Germany related with the event [9]. Map-based web sites, like Ushaidi or OpenStreetMap, are spontaneously used by citizens to share geolocated crisis information [7; 10; 11]. However, how this crowd intelligence can be further integrated into the decision-making process of agencies is still an open question [5; 9], since professional emergency managers and decision-makers need to rely upon timely and accurate information and citizen-generated content might not fit these criteria [5; 9; 12; 13]. In this work we focus on the citizen-to-government interaction with a view to exploring the role that social and mobile computing might play to turn citizen participation into a valuable asset when emergency management (EM henceforth) is conceived as a coproduction service. The term coproduction was introduced by [PERSON] to refer to \"_the process through which inputs used to produce a good or service are contributed by individuals who are not in the same organization_\" [14]. Envisaging EM as a coproduction service implies looking for ways to integrate participants who are not part of the EM corps and agencies (EMA henceforth) into the different phases of the EM process, namely, preparation, response, mitigation, and recovery [15]. Currently, agents, like non-governmental agencies or volunteers, already participate actively as external partners, but the role of citizens is still quite limited and rarely coordinated with the action of EMAs [8] that tend to adopt a command-and-control structure that facilitates accountable decision-making [16]. Panic or disorganization among citizens, which are usually claimed by EMAs to apply command-and-control policies, rarely happen and do not affect to the community and individual capabilities to mobilize their social capital [17]. Moreover, with the advent of social and mobile computing, citizens are also developing a digital social capital [1], defined as the process of building online communities who pursue common goals and can be mobilized to act more efficiently. The existence of this digital social capital makes it possible to involve also citizens who are not affected by the crisis [8; 11].