SCC-CIVIC-FA Track B Design for Community Resilience: Participatory Civic Technology to Close the Last-Mile Disaster Relief Gap in Puerto Rico

We seek to pilot a participatory civic technology initiative, re+connect, to close the last-mile disaster relief gap and create long-term resilience for underserved communities with software technology, data intelligence, and social infrastructure. Building on extensive collaborative research and design efforts from the past three years, we aim to mobilize, inform, and coordinate collective action across residents, community groups, and governmental and non-governmental entities in disaster management to direct the right responses, to the right places, at the right time. The pilot initiative integrates an accessible, reliable, and user-friendly software application with an inclusive community engagement program to enable and empower residents to act as “community ambassadors” to crowdsource key information to bridge the gap between essential resources and services provision and community needs in the face of disasters. Through the 12-month stage 2 period, we aim to crowdsource information for at least 50,000 residents from across Puerto Rico, with the goal of yielding a sustainable, scalable, and transferable initiative for the entire archipelago in the next five years. In the face of climate change, island, and coastal communities, such as those in Puerto Rico, will face more frequent and destructive disasters such as hurricanes and floods. Our initiative aims better prepare for future disasters through the following aspects: 1) Strengthen social bonds as the core of building resilience and survival mechanisms. 2) Integrate local knowledge to make disaster management more human-centered and effective. 3) Enhance collaboration as a path to building resilience and reducing risk. 4) Provide valuable lessons for building disaster resilience and risk reduction in other contexts. Our project uses participatory design research to build a civic technology initiative that enhances several key factors of community resilience: 1) including local knowledge and information into overall disaster mitigation and response activities; 2) supporting collaboration through enriching social capital within and across key stakeholder groups in disaster-prone areas; and 3) augmenting and facilitating prosocial behaviors by informal actors during emergency response. We bring together an interdisciplinary team to design, validate, and pilot a more adaptive and inclusive participatory civic technology solution in Puerto Rico, with implications for other relevant contexts such as the Caribbean islands, Central America, and the Gulf Coast of the United States. Our findings will contribute to an improved understanding of overcoming the challenges that hinder the effective management of disaster information and knowledge, leading to improved coordination and collaboration across individuals, community groups, and formal institutions to achieve disaster management goals. This project is jointly funded by CIVIC and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The CIVIC program is jointly funded by NSF, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Energy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.