Discussion and Analysis of the Crowdsourcing Mode of Public Participation in Emergency Management

The crowdsourcing mode of public participation in emergency management is a new method that appears in recent years, and a comprehensive discussion and analysis of this new mode is helpful to its further improvement. This paper firstly presents a detailed analysis of the concept, components and processes of crowdsourcing, and discusses the background and origin reason of the combination of public participation in emergency management and crowdsourcing. Then, this study, using the case study method, deeply analyzes the successful application of a crowdsourcing platform named Ushahidi in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti from the aspects of source, processing and utilization of emergency information. Finally, this paper sums up some frontier topics that need a further research in the crowdsourcing mode of public participation in emergency management.