Enhancing societal resilience against disasters: engaging the public VIA social technologies

Abstract

There is a number of e-tools designed for exchange of information at different levels (global, EU, national, local, organizational), serving for different tasks of pre-, during or/and post-disaster management. Those could be grouped by their purposes to the following ones: e-tools for warning of communities at risk, based on broadcasting; WebGIS-based crowdsourcing platforms to collect and update user generated content; Open-source ICT platforms Oriented on Public awareness on natural disasters; ICTs for civil protection planning, decision making for response, recovery and allocation of resources in case of disasters. The most oriented on public engagement are broadcasting and crowdsourcing based ICT tools. However, the empirical research revealed that use of such kind of social technologies by Lithuanians remains relatively vague in terms of public activity: crowdsourcing platforms are mostly uploaded with small-scale problems of everyday life character, and use of the broadcasting services among citizens is not popular enough yet, and some organizational and technological barriers worsen situation even more. This could point to an assumption that Lithuanian society does not percept disasters as real threats for their lives, health, property or environment. Research limitations – The current research is not sophisticated with the comparative analysis of experiences of foreign countries in application of broadcasting and crowdsourcing based technologies for increasing societal resilience. Such analysis could be useful for development of effective means for enhancing public awareness on disasters, consequently – for building safety culture in Lithuania by application of social technologies. Therefore, investigation of good praxis could be considered as a relevant topic for further research. [...]