Connected Self-Organized Citizens in Crises: An Interdisciplinary Resilience Concept for Neighborhoods

Abstract

When facing major crisis events, such as earthquakes, flooding, or attacks on infrastructure, people start to organize within their neighborhoods. While this has historically been an analog process, people now use collaboration or messenger apps to support their self-organization. Unfortunately, these apps are not designed to be resilient and fail with communication infrastructure outages when servers are no longer available. We provide a resilience concept with requirements derived from an interdisciplinary view enabling citizens to communicate and collaborate in everyday life and during crisis events. Our human-centered prototype integrates concepts of nudging for crisis preparedness, decentralized and secure communication, participation, smart resource management, historical knowledge, and legal issues to help guide further research.