Preventive disaster management through crowdsourcing

Over the last 20 years (1991 to 2010), out of every $100 spent on development, only $3.50 was directed towards disasters and within that, out of every $100 spent on disasters, only $12.70 was spent on preventing them(Kellet, 2015). But the preventive disaster management has a great scope of less-explored possibilities considering Geographic Information System (GIS) data modeling, community involvement and collaborative urban management. This paper addresses the need to study preventive disaster management and mainstream it in the urban planning processes. The first step towards achieving this goal demands access to a large amount of disaster risk data at a local scale. There is no doubt that crowdsourcing techniques have proved to be instrumental during times of crisis in the past. Social media platforms have helped rescue operations, reach those in need and they could gather access to data points from communicating with millions of citizens during a crisis. Emergency services have been successful in acknowledging this potential in the social media surge in the aftermath of a disaster. This paper rethinks the usage of crowdsourcing before the occurrence of a disaster with the intent to develop more resilient cities. Crowdsourcing is seen as a tool to pool the necessary resources - the data layers as well as the talent, thus creating a meaningful collaborative urban management system required to mainstream disaster management and urban planning. In this paper, thepossibilities of imbibing open innovation and crowdsourcing methods in the subject of Disaster Risk Reduction are explored with the creation of a model. This modelachieves three main goals:Firstly, to promote a system that tracks cities? performance in the matter of planning and urban management; secondly, to mainstream disaster management in planning and make the interaction between the two seamless in the future and lastly, create and stimulate collaboration among different players in the disaster management arena.