Design and development of a crowdsourcing mobile app for disaster response

The explosion of web-based GIS technologies and the opening up of mapping services to citizens in the past decade have resulted in a whole range of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) communities like OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and Wikimapia, which are used to assist emergency management operations on a large scale. However, many crowdsourcing systems for disaster recovery have multiple obstacles like accessibility, ease of use, dependency on social media and requirement of special skill sets on the part of the public participants that serve as limitations to the fulfillment of the democratization potential of VGI. In this paper, we design and develop a crowdsourcing mobile app for disaster response based on several requirements: user friendliness, user anonymity, real-time updating and viewing of geographic information, bi-directional communication between users and emergency responders, simple interface design, and easy download. Mobile apps like this are very useful for creating and disseminating quality and timely geographic information during emergencies.