Designing for Networked Community Resilience

Communities have been described to be at the heart of the preparedness for and the response to disasters. The increasing connectedness has made communities more vulnerable for their dependence on a complex network of critical infrastructures. At the same time, this very connectedness has the potential to enable communities to self-organise, engage, and connect with other communities to improve their resilience. While the pathway to more resilience is promising and has many advocates, the response to crises and disasters, time and again reveals the challenges related to (i) ad-hoc switching from preparedness to response; (ii) ad-hoc connecting professional responders, communities, volunteers, and local authorities; and (iii) designing systems and tools that are tailored such that the feedback from local communities can be taken into account for coordination and planning. Therefore, a paradigm shift is needed in designing crisis and disaster management information systems linking ad-hoc response to longer-term planning, in which networks of communities are at the core of the process. This paper sets out to provide a critical review on community-resilience literature. From there, it develops a research design principles for information systems to improve community resilience.