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

This project seeks to pilot a participatory civic technology initiative, re+connect, to close the last-mile disaster relief gap and create long-term resilience for under-served communities in Puerto Rico. Home to 3.2 million people, Puerto Rico is confronted with more frequent and more destructive disasters such as hurricanes and floods. The need to better prepare the Island for future disasters is immense and urgent.

Building on collaborative research and design efforts from the past three years, this project aims to mobilize, inform, and coordinate collective action through a mobile application and engagement program 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. Currently, there is limited guidance on how to design such systems that effectively leverage the strengths, resources, and best practices of communities and citizens in response to disasters.

This project brings together a team with expertise and experiences across humanitarian innovation, participatory design, civic engagement, social and behavioral science, disaster informatics, software technology, and social entrepreneurship to both advance knowledge and understanding in key fields related to disaster management and generate measurable, inclusive, and equitable social impacts. Successful implementation of the initiative will enhance peoples' access to essential resources and services by strengthening social connectedness, improving local disaster information and knowledge inclusion, and facilitating collaboration and coordination across stakeholders to achieve disaster management goals.

This project aims to build, test, and pilot an initiative that integrates an accessible, reliable, and user-friendly software application and community engagement program to crowdsource key information to bridge the gap between essential resources and services provision and community needs. With the goal of yielding a sustainable, scalable, and transferable initiative across the Island, this project aims to reach at least 100,000 residents from the most vulnerable communities and generate knowledge and lessons learned to serve as a model for efforts in other disaster-prone regions.

The Stage 1 award will support a series of planning activities to: 1) Solidify roles, governance, and management structure across the proposing team; 2) Strengthen collaboration with implementing partners (civic partners who will be potential users of the initiative) and expand stakeholder buy-in; and 3) Refine the vision and plan for executing the pilot project in Stage 2. The team will refine implementation plans for product development; research; community engagement; business, implementation, and growth; humanitarian ethics, data, and technology governance; and monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning.

CIVIC is a joint program with NSF, Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, FEMA, and Department of Energy Vehicle Technology Office.

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.