Collaborative refinement of emergency plans through public engagement

Emergency plans are fundamental for the speedy and effective response in disaster situations. Plans are often constructed by teams of experts, who apply their expertise to define response procedures, but lack part of location-specific knowledge that can be very relevant to make decisions during responses. Such knowledge is, however, in the minds of people who use those spaces every day, but are not involved in the planning processes. In this paper, we advocate for citizens' involvement in emergency plan elaboration via Public Participation, a mechanism long time used in other areas of e-government. We define the steps of a collaborative process for the elicitation of citizen's knowledge via Public Participation. A summary of the results of an initial case study is used to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal for improving emergency plans.