# Coproduction as an Approach to Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management
## 3 Design Case Study: The Participative Roles of Citizens in EM  
Technologies that promote effective and reliable collaboration in EM among different stakeholders, including first responders, decision- and policy-makers, volunteers, and citizens, are sociotechnical \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**EM Phases** & **Top-Down Hierarchical EM [15]** & **Community-Level EM [28]** \\ \hline \multirow{3}{*}{Mitigation} & Deciding what to do when a risk has & \multirow{3}{*}{Reducing the vulnerability of} \\  & been determined and implementing a & \\  & risk reduction program & \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Preparedness} & Developing a response plan and & \\  & training first responders & \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Response} & Providing emergency aid & Utilization of social capital in problematic \\  & and assistance & situations, evoking resilience \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Recovery} & Provide support until the community & \multirow{2}{*}{Reestablishment of social capital,} \\  & returns to normal & leveraging resilience \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Different perspectives of the EM (emergency management) phases. systems; their design focuses on implications on people and the work environment, that is, on the social structures and behaviors that are affected by technology [31]. In our case, to use technology to empower organizations and citizens it is necessary to understand the capabilities citizens can provide and how these capabilities can be aligned with the goals and needs of EMAs. With that purpose, we describe in this section a design case study that shows how citizen roles and capabilities were identified in the context of a project aimed at using social and mobile computing to increase citizen participation in EM [32]. A design case study is a research approach that consists of empirically analyzing the existing practices in a specific field of application to design technological artifacts that cope with the findings of such analysis [9; 33]. As described in section 3.1, our design case study started by analyzing the current practices on the integration of technology-mediated citizen participation in EMAs. Two empirical studies with professional EM workers and decision-makers helped to understand the current situation and perception about citizen participation. They also helped to find out opportunities and challenges where technology could support a coproduction EM service. As posited by [PERSON], an important step in devising coproduction services is to clearly shape both terms \"co\" and \"production\" [18], that is, who are the coproducers or types of actors involved in the process, and what is it that is going to be coproduced? Thus, an important goal of the design process in the case study was to identify the potential roles citizens might play as EM coproducers (section 3.2) and the scenarios where technology might help to integrate their potential contributions with the EMAs working protocols and tools (section 3.3). Concerning the type of production expected, [PERSON] [3] identifies three types of coproduction: _citizen sourcing_, when citizens contribute to make government more responsive and effective; _government as a platform_, when the government ICT infrastructure is made available to citizens to help them take decisions; and _do it yourself government_, when citizens self-organize themselves with little or no government intervention. In this work we will study EM as a citizen-sourcing reproduction process. Empirical Studies with Emergency Workers and Decision-Makers: Understanding Their Perspective on Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation  
To understand the perception of EMAs about the use of social and mobile computing to integrate citizens in their practice, two empirical studies were carried out with professionals of different agencies. The first one was performed on 2011 and was aimed at finding out the main challenges that EMAs had to integrate social networks in their daily practices.