Crisis crowdsourcing and China’s civic participation in disaster response: Evidence from earthquake relief

Abstract

The devastating 2008 Wenchuan earthquake unfolded the co-evolution of a proactive civic engagement and extensive application of web-based information and communication technologies (ICTs) in China’s disaster response. However, existing literature has not yet sufficiently examined how ad hoc web-based voluntary participation has led to long-term development of digital disaster management in China in the wake of the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. The present article addresses this gap by focusing on one specific type of ICT-mediated civic effort, crisis crowdsourcing, and presenting newly collected empirical evidence from relief work in the 2008 Wenchuan, 2010 Yushu, and 2013 Lushan earthquakes. This article examines the emergence of a broad-based digitally enabled civic participation in disaster response and its more general political implications. The main findings of this study suggest that web-based ICTs have not only enabled the relatively weak and episodic social actors to overcome constraints on information, fundraising, organizational development and to achieve collective development in a field historically dominated by the state, but also facilitated the evolution of a parallel disaster management system with agenda, skills and expertise independent of the state.

Promoting Disaster Resilience: Operation Mechanisms and Self-Organizing Processes of Crowdsourcing

“…(5) Context-base responses: the importance of context is essential to the functioning of each unique system. For example, the Chinese government's regulatory framework has impeded volunteers from crisis mapping in China because private mapping is unlawful [40]. In addition, Peta Jakarta was adapted to include crowdsourcing systems that were already being used by the community [45].…”

“…In the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, a QQ group named 'Home of the volunteers' published information about the disaster, coordinated the delivery of relief materials and connected a large number of rescue workers, volunteers, and resources within and outside the disaster area [40]. At its peak, the virtual community gathered more than 200 active volunteers and coordinated more than a third of Sichuan's civilian organizations in disaster relief efforts [40]. They realized a positive interaction with the government-led emergency and disaster reduction mechanisms and carried out the self-organized and orderly disaster reduction activities to make up for the deficiency of government disaster action.…”

“…China 2010 Yushu Earthquake [40] The Huaxia Commonwealth Service Centre (a coalition of NGOs) set up a special forum on their website to release information about the disaster and to coordinate and organize members, other social groups and individual volunteers to participate in disaster relief. The released information was predominantly collected through two social networks: the Blue Sky Rescue (an alliance of civic outdoor rescue teams), and a network alumni association composed of students and white-collar professionals from the Qinghai Province.…”

Analyzing the Role of Resource Factors in Citizens’ Intention to Pay for and Participate in Disaster Management

“…The disaster management paradigm has shifted from being centralized and government-based to being decentralized, citizen-based, and participatory. The extensive participation of citizens during the occurrence of disasters not only provides support to relieve the gap of disaster damage and solve vulnerability but also has a positive influence on rebuilding after disasters as well as developing the local community [1][2][3][4][5]. Hicks et al demonstrated that citizens' participation led to global mapping and resulted in enhancing the disaster reduction [6].…”

Global Mapping of Citizen Science Projects for Disaster Risk Reduction

“…For earthquakes particularly, this is likely because of the prevalence of crowdsourcing-related projects for earthquake reporting (e.g., Wald et al, 2012;Kong et al, 2016; FIGURE 1 | Global map showing numbers of published citizen science projects with a DRR focus. Argentina (Le Coz et al, 2016), Australia (Madsen and O'Mullan, 2013;Yates and Partridge, 2015;Haworth et al, 2016;Hung et al, 2016;Zhong et al, 2016;Haworth, 2018), Belgium (Mossoux et al, 2016), Brazil (Marchezini et al, 2017;Hirata et al, 2018), Canada (Tappenden, 2015;Díaz et al, 2016;Rieger, 2016), Montserrat (Loughlin et al, 2002), Chile (Usón et al, 2016), China (Peng, 2017;Qi et al, 2017;Svensson, 2017), Colombia (Hermelin and Bedoya, 2008;Loaiza et al, 2017), Cambodia (Aalst et al, 2008), Costa Rica (Aalst et al, 2008), Czech Republic (Raška and Brázdil, 2015;Panek et al, 2017), Denmark (Frigerio et al, 2017), Democratic Republic of the Congo (De Albuquerque et al, 2016), Ecuador (Ibadango et al, 2007;Stone et al, 2014;Mothes et al, 2015;Armijos et al, 2017), Europe (Bossu et al, 2012;Wehn et al, 2015a;Maltoni et al, 2017). Finland (Frigerio et al, 2017), Global (Tapia et al, 2014;Bossu et al, 2016;...…”