Integrating citizen initiatives in a technological platform for collaborative crisis management

Although they can make a significant contribution to crisis response and management, citizens tend to be underestimated and under-integrated by official crisis responders. There is a necessity to take citizen contribution into crisis management tools, both for the information they can provide (information-focused volunteers) and the actions they can carry out (action-focused volunteers). Therefore, professionals need to be aware of the diverse ways citizens can help them to manage a critical situation: obviously by improving the situational awareness, but also by spontaneously performing tasks to meet specific needs on the ground. After presenting the RIO-Suite software, a crisis management tool based on collaboration of stakeholders, this paper suggests ideas about how to make the most of action-focused volunteers to improve the orchestration of the crisis response. Given a volunteer action, four possible decision types are identified: Ignore, Stop, Consider and Support, and their consequences on 1) the crisis response and 2) the collaboration process are presented.