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Disaster management calls for increased collaboration with citizens

July 8th, 2015

Nowadays disasters and crises are often complex and they are seen as long processes rather than incidents. Therefore, their mitigation involves many organisations and public groups, making collaboration an important point of attention. European researchers have created a wiki to help response organisations to effectively communicate with citizens.

The PEP (Public Empowerment Policies for Crisis Management - FP7-284927) project delivered a web platform with guidelines for response organisations and authorities in the form of a wiki. The guidelines help increase community resilience. The researchers explain that, for enhancing preparedness, top-down campaigns are less effective than initiatives with citizen involvement. A sustainable, approach systematically acknowledges social networks and social fabrics. Moreover, civil society actors should also be included in the policy making for societal resilience.

One of the major challenges for collaboration between municipalities and NGOs is the lack of common meeting platforms and, in consequence, low degrees of interaction between voluntary groups and municipal representatives. Policies are needed to create common platforms, for example through joint exercises, or new forms of organisation supported by ICT to facilitate communication in loosely connected networks of individual non-organised volunteers.

Inclusive approaches are not only expected on the local level. For example, on the national level collaboration with civil society groups and associations can be initiated so that the needs of special groups are taken into account, for example, ensuring accessibility norms for security applications so that also people with disabilities are included. On the (inter)national level norms for the use of crowdsourcing could receive attention, for example, ownership of data gathered, and codes of conduct.

More information:
'Crisis communication wiki for professionals' is available at www.projectPEP.eu

Provided by CORDIS

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