# Coproduction as an Approach to Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management
## 3 Design Case Study: The Participative Roles of Citizens in EM
#### 3.1.2 Second Study: Understanding the Perception of a More Active Citizen Participation  
The second study was oriented towards analyzing current practices in technology-mediated citizen participation, and it was performed in Spain where the project was aimed at deploying technology. The study was based on a web questionnaire organized in three sections: the first one was about the professional profile of participants; the second section included questions related with current practices involving citizen participation in EM; and, finally, a last section was aimed at exploring how participants envisioned citizen participation in the future and the role ICT technologies might play in such a future. The questionnaire included both closed questions answered using 4-value Likert scales, as well as open questions. Data analysis and findings are thoroughly described in [36]. The web questionnaire was open from April to May 2013. During these two months, several Spanish emergency organizations were invited to participate. Since there was no possible way to reward participants, who were professional, paid workers, coordinators of the EMAs were used as facilitators to invite their workers to take part in the survey. In order to encourage participation two conditions were clearly stated: a) the participation was anonymous and no information, comments or perceptions of workers would be disclosed to their EMAs, b) the study had nothing to do with potential policies to substitute current workers with non-paid volunteers. This last issue raised many concerns, since the survey was being carried out in a period of economic crisis where many public services were suffering serious budget cuts and some participants were afraid that accepting a higher citizen participation would result on having fewer professional workers. At the end 29 professionals took part in the study. They worked for seven different organizations in charge of cities or regions that in total involved more than 3.5 million people.  
The main problems identified were basically the same that emerged in the first study and in the literature: the difficulty to trust the information provided by the citizens and the lack of resources to handle large quantities of information generated in social networks. What was more interesting was their perceptions on how to envision citizen participation that was collected through a series of questions aimed at identifying potential citizen roles. In particular, participants explored three potential roles: citizens as mere informants (called _sensors_), citizens informing and reacting to an event following the instructions of authorities (called _reactive sensors_), and citizens taking the lead in EM activities (called _proactive sensors_). The preferred role for the participants was _reactive sensors_, that is, citizens with an involvement that goes further of just providing information though this would imply in the words of one of the participants _\"to invest in preparation and training before trusting them\"_.