An Event-Driven Lens for Bridging Formal Organizations and Informal Online Participation: How Policy Informatics Enables Just-in-Time Responses to Crises

Policy informatics not only gives new approaches to analyzing policy challenges, but also provides guidance for understanding new forms of organizing in the digital era. This chapter aims to investigate how technology accelerates the creation of just-in-time efforts while also lowering the barriers for joining such efforts to an increasingly diverse set of formal and informal actors who can make a meaningful contribution in the context of emergency management. In this chapter, we suggest a novel and extended lens called an ‘event-driven’ lens for integrating formal and informal responses by reviewing the literature on emergency management, crowdsourcing, open innovation, policy informatics, and digital humanitarianism. The novel lens is called an event-driven lens because crises serve as a focusing event that suddenly bring about not only the activation of formal organizations and their latent networks across the levels of government and the sectors, but also the emergence of many informal actors across the globe and from the affected communities to collectively respond to disasters or crises. Traditionally, emergency preparedness and response are in large part the role and responsibility of formal organizations like emergency management agencies and police and fire departments. Due to concurrent advances in a variety of technologies (information, communication, and artificial intelligence), informal groups of publics from both across the globe and the affected regions now regularly emerge and can play a significant role in the response through crowdsourcing vital information and assisting with the allocation of needed resources and services.