An Event-Driven Lens for Bridging Formal Organizations and Informal Online Participation: How Policy Informatics Enables Just-in-Time Responses to Crises

Chul Hyun Park () and Erik W. Johnston ()
Additional contact information
Chul Hyun Park: University of Arkansas
Erik W. Johnston: University of Arkansas

A chapter in Policy Analytics, Modelling, and Informatics, 2018, pp 343-361 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Policy informatics not only gives new approaches to analyzing policy challenges, but also provides guidance for understanding new forms of organizing in the digital era. This chapter aims to investigate how technology accelerates the creation of just-in-time efforts while also lowering the barriers for joining such efforts to an increasingly diverse set of formal and informal actors who can make a meaningful contribution in the context of emergency management. In this chapter, we suggest a novel and extended lens called an ‘event-driven’ lens for integrating formal and informal responses by reviewing the literature on emergency management, crowdsourcing, open innovation, policy informatics, and digital humanitarianism. The novel lens is called an event-driven lens because crises serve as a focusing event that suddenly bring about not only the activation of formal organizations and their latent networks across the levels of government and the sectors, but also the emergence of many informal actors across the globe and from the affected communities to collectively respond to disasters or crises. Traditionally, emergency preparedness and response are in large part the role and responsibility of formal organizations like emergency management agencies and police and fire departments. Due to concurrent advances in a variety of technologies (information, communication, and artificial intelligence), informal groups of publics from both across the globe and the affected regions now regularly emerge and can play a significant role in the response through crowdsourcing vital information and assisting with the allocation of needed resources and services.

Keywords: Policy informatics; Crisis informatics; Information and communication technology; Computational technology; Crowdsourcing; Digital humanitarianism; Emergency management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:paitcp:978-3-319-61762-6_15

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319617626

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-61762-6_15

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Public Administration and Information Technology from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().