# Coproduction as an Approach to Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management
## 5 Conclusions  
Citizens are valuable assets who can contribute with their skills and social resources to build more efficient public services, as the research on reproduction has shown in many different domains, from police, to health or education [3; 18; 19; 27; 28]. Emergency managament is not different from other public services and relying upon citizens will make organization not less, but more, efficient, as well as contribute to promote more connected and resilient communities. Social and mobile computing applications can contribute to take profit from an existing social digital capital but for this to be possible technologies have to be designed along with EM decision-makers and workers to also understand their needs and fears. In this paper we discussed through a design case study how we involved EM professionals in discussions about the roles citizens could play. These roles were used to avoid the generalization of the concept of citizen as a homogenous entity instead of a heterogoonous crowd and, thus, force EM workers and decisions-makers to think about capabilities that some citizens could contribute with to an EM process envisioned as a coproduction system. Analyzing the roles enabled discussions on the characteristics that could make EM professionals to categorize a citizen within a specific role and how citizens could acquire more advanced roles with higher capabilities to take decisions and act. We also discussed the technical implications of the scenarios where these roles were involved, providing both information and skills. Deploying technological tools to exercise these roles might promote a higher engagement with the community the EM workers that might encourage citizens to get ready to assume more responsibilities in the process. Coproduction is also learning experience, where citizens get a deeper knowledge, awareness, and understanding on the work of professionals, and public services understand the strenghts and vulnerabilities of the communities and how they can contribute and not only get help.  
From a technical point of view, further work should focus on other phases of the EM process particularly in the preparation phase, in order to establish a continuous relationship with citizen both to guarantee they will be able to use the tools when a crisis happens and also to engage them in the process and promote the generation of digital social capital on EM. Gamification and pervasive computing might be technologies that could help to engage citizens in rewarding experiences but the reasons to coproduce are varied, and as stated by [PERSON] there is not a unique recipe that works in all cases [18]. Whilst, in some cultures, personal or social recognition might work, in other cases coproducers will be more active if negative incentives are used.  
This work is supported by the project emerCien grant funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2012-09687) and by the grant PRX15/00184 funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. Authors would like to thank to the City Council of Richmond and Madrid 112 for their participation in the organization of the empirical workshops and to all the EM workers who participated with their comments and views.  
[PERSON] and [PERSON] performed the empirical studies and focus group. The three authors worked together on the study of coproduction and its application to emergency management. [PERSON] contributed to establish the theoretical framework of the research.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.