Digitalized Co-production: Using Volunteers as First Responders

This study explores digitalized co-production using citizens as volunteer first responders in cities with as specific focus on socially vulnerable areas. It shows that volunteers can make a major difference, e.g., saving lives, administering CPR and extinguishing fires. The ICT artefact is crucial to the co-production by allowing volunteers to be dispatched through their own mobile phones and providing geographical positioning. Identified challenges include to make individual engagement collective, to reduce the risk of the volunteers being exposed to dangerous situations and to further calibration of the ICT. The study argues for digitalization as an enabler of new co-production initiatives, with basic mobile ICT artefacts as the starting point, and that local public sector initiatives aimed to improve inclusion, safety and first response can have positive consequences both nationally and globally. It also contributes to a merging of research perspectives from public administration and information systems, with reference to digitalized co-production.