Crisis crowdsourcing and China’s civic participation in disaster response: Evidence from earthquake relief

What is crisis crowdsourcing?

Crisis crowdsourcing, taken literally, is applying the method of crowdsourcing in disaster response. Crowdsourcing, first conceptualized by Jeff Howe in 2006, ² has become a popular peer problem-solving method in both business and sociopolitical contexts. Nowadays, crowdsourcing is generally defined as a type of participative online activity or process that ‘involves large groups of users who are not organized centrally and generate shared content’. ³ Crowdsourcing is mainly deployed by individuals or organizations to deal with tasks that are huge or highly repetitive and can be subdivided and outsourced as microtasks to a large group of people via open calls on the Internet. The notion of ‘crowd’ does not simply highlight the quantity of participants. It also reveals more profound philosophical and ideological underpinnings of innovative usage of web-based ICTs by ordinary people, such as non-discriminatory participation (i.e. low requirement of professional skills or formal training), the virtue of voluntarism, and the utilitarian and ethical advantages of collective wisdom. ⁴

Originating as an innovative business model, crowdsourcing is now being widely used in the social and political domains. It is also being applied to a variety of fields of work that used to be dominated by formally trained exports and technocrats, such as urban planning, humanitarian intervention, and emergency response. Although the application of the methodologies and technologies of crowdsourcing for disaster management and humanitarian aid is a relatively new phenomenon, it is built upon the same set of mutually reinforcing technical and social trends in the information age as other forms of crowdsourcing efforts. These include the widespread use of participatory web-based ICT tools, the revival of amateurism, the emergence of open-source software movement, and the development of digital volunteer networks and self-organized communities across the cyberspace. ⁵ However, despite the shared technological and social prerequisites and similarities in basic organizational and functional features, crisis crowdsourcing is distinguished from other types of crowdsourcing efforts. This is especially the case in two primary aspects of the application of crowdsourcing for social and political purposes.

First of all, the participants of crisis crowdsourcing deal with very specific social and technical challenges that are conditioned by the nature of disasters. From the perspective of crisis informatics, disasters can be regarded as crisis communication. The immediate goal of the practitioners of crisis crowdsourcing is to address this imperative problem by collecting real-time information about the affected communities and displaying it to relief actors outside of the disaster space. Typical products of such web-based collaborative efforts are crowdsourced disaster assessment in written format or visualized disaster maps. Typical activities of crisis crowdsourcing include the following steps: preliminary assessment of damage and needs; individuals or organizations making an ‘open call’ online; recruiting online volunteers to collect and process data from a vast array of sources; analysing the crowdsourced data; and generating written disaster updates or visualized disaster maps for responders. In international disaster response operations, translation is oftentimes a very important content of the crowd work and the foundation of crowdsourced disaster reports and disaster maps.

The third important feature of crisis crowdsourcing is its distinctive built-in political autonomy. Many crowdsourced tasks and crowdsourcing platforms with social and political orientations are launched and managed by government agencies to address problems prescribed by the authorities. But in the very specific field of disaster response, the pressing needs for collecting information inside the disaster space and integrating it with the formal response system have never been successfully defined and addressed by the state actors. The methodologies and technologies of crisis crowdsourcing are innovative and independent social responses to the abovementioned dilemma faced by the mainstream disaster response system. Originating as highly improvisational and informal web-based volunteering, such cyberactivism, by effective learning and conscious efforts of networking, rapidly evolved. It now functions as an array of proactive and stable networks of volunteer technical communities, and has successfully turned crisis crowdsourcing into an integral part of international disaster response. The crowd-based, volunteered information management consists of a comprehensive set of specialized skills, knowledge, and governing mechanisms that can only be effectively applied by the decentralized networks of techno-activists and digital volunteers. The task of crisis mapping, the most distinctive and important contribution of this new form of cyberactivism, is not only built upon inputs from distributed networks of volunteers far away from the disaster space, but also reliant on citizen self-reports from the crisis-affected communities. Such community engagement and empowerment of the affected people are unimaginable for traditional hierarchical response systems.

The 2010 Haitian earthquake triggered the first large-scale application of the methods and technologies of crowdsourcing in information collection and analysis in international disaster response. Such innovative digital social initiatives not only gave rise to a more stable network of volunteer technical communities specialized in crisis mapping, but also drew scholarly attention to this innovative form of cyberactivism and generated a growing body of scholarship. But so far, most of the existing studies of crisis crowdsourcing are from the fields of humanitarian aid, development, and disaster management, and policy analyses. More importantly, in-depth research on the political aspects and implications of such participatory and distributed web-based activities is still missing. This study supplements the research on crisis crowdsourcing and more general ICT-mediated public participation in policy and political arenas by conducting in-depth case analysis at the national level and presenting new empirical evidence from an unlikely political environment that has been hostile to proactive citizen engagement from home and overseas.

Crowdsourcing, cyber empowerment, and contesting autonomy of civil society in China

Although research on the political impacts of the Internet in China is thriving, only a handful of social scientists have captured the growing phenomenon of crowdsourcing or similar forms of cyber mass-based activism in China. Further, within this literature there has been only brief discussion of the political significance of such digital participatory practice. ⁶ Given this, in-depth political studies of crowdsourcing and systematic conceptualization of its long-term sociopolitical effects are still missing in the China field. But in other fields of study, focusing on China or not, there is a large and steadily growing body of academic literature on the political application or politicalized implications of crowdsourcing upon which the analytical framework of this research can be built.

The increased application of crowdsourcing in social and political domains in North America and Western Europe, and even within some less developed countries in the early 2000s, has given rise to a growing body of scholarly work on this participatory practice and its political implications. Social scientists from various disciplines pay a great deal of attention to the built-in participatory dynamics and empowering effect of such collaborative problem solving strategy, especially when it is deployed in social and political contexts. For instance, in the studies of conflict monitoring and disaster response, researchers show that such crowd-based problem-solving strategies as crisis mapping can empower local communities and individuals to not only make better decisions for themselves, but also help other equally disadvantaged people and provide solutions for the general public. ⁷ In spite of the disagreement on the actual impact of crowdsourcing on democracy, ⁸ researchers from various fields of studies tend to agree that the participatory and collaborative tendencies of crowdsourcing are embedded in its technological foundation, namely the web-based ICTs. ⁹ Many scholars contend that the combination of the tactic of crowdsourcing with enabling ICTs and the deployment of this intrinsically participatory tactic can lower social and technical barriers for public participation, provide new channels and generate new forms of civic engagement in politically constrained contexts, ¹⁰ including authoritarian states such as China. ¹¹

This research also draws upon another broad body of literature on the development, autonomy and political relevance of civil society in contemporary China to conceptualize the long-term political implications of crowdsourcing. There are two important and growing trends within the circle of the study of China’s civil society. One is the growing consensus on the mutual energizing relationship between civil society and the Internet, a notion first proposed by Guobin Yang and one which is getting increased scholarly support in the last decade. ¹² The other trend is that the simplistic binaries, such as civil society vs state or democracy vs authoritarianism, have been widely considered insufficient and misleading to capture the ambivalence and complexity of civic engagement and civil society in contemporary China. For instance, Yang calls for more scholarly attention to the sophistication and ambivalence of the rapidly changing citizen activism in cyberspace by showing that many newly developed forms of cyber citizen self-mobilization cannot be precisely categorized as either political or apolitical, or confrontational or consensual. ¹³ Ning Zhang examines the newly developed online backpacker communities and shows how such civic self-associations push forward social change and address social problems through extensive interactions with offline collective actions, without directly or intentionally contesting the authorities. ¹⁴ Jessica Teets proposes an action-oriented approach to transcend the dichotomous model and study the political dynamics of China’s civil society by focusing on the actual practices and ability of civil society organizations to push forward concrete policy change by proactively and positively engaging the authoritarian state. ¹⁵

This research is generally in line with these new trends in conceptualizing the complex changes of China’s civil society in the age of the Internet. However, this article contests one particular proposition within the second academic trend that undermines the importance of autonomy in theorizing China’s civil society and its political relevance. For instance, Teets suggests that autonomy should not be regarded as ‘the primary determinant of the relationship but rather allowing for a relational view that includes varying degrees of partnership and collaboration’. ¹⁶ Rather than challenging the analytical caution behind such a proposition and getting trapped by the dilemma of a dichotomous approach, I contest the intrinsically pessimistic conceptualization of China’s civil society and its interaction with the powerful state. First, the pessimistic proposition under-estimates both the creativity of China’s civic actors and the political empowerment effect of the ever-developing ICTs. Actually, there are studies of some emerging policy domains also showing that, even without conscious and creative application of enabling technologies, China’s civil society actors are still capable of setting alternative policy agendas by undertaking effective and collective self-learning and capacity building, ¹⁷ or providing the government with more novel and forward-looking solutions for social problems with techniques or knowledge acquired independently. ¹⁸ Some scholars even contend that, with sufficient self-acquired resources and capacity, with or without the support of ICTs, social actors’ cooperation with the government is not a necessity but a choice. ¹⁹ Into the age of the Internet, the new enabling technologies expand the autonomy of social actors by significantly lowering the technical barriers and creating new tools for resource and social mobilization. Autonomy is evident here in the degree to which social actors are able to raise funds and mobilize public support, as well as in the increasing costs of state regulation due to the anonymity and openness of the web-based ICTs. ²⁰ With the help of new enabling technologies, old and new social actors are more efficient in providing innovative solutions for various types of social problems. Social actors can also increasingly provide tailored services for very specific segments of the population by inventing and reproducing knowledge, techniques, and even governing rules independent of the authorities. ²¹

Second, the pessimistic argument is built upon studies focusing on formal organizations, neglecting the tremendous covert and overt power of informal networks, self-organized communities, and other highly decentralized and distributed interaction only made possible in the age of the Internet. ²² Although still few in number, scholarly works on the new civil association and voluntary participation mediated and facilitated by the open-source technologies are emerging in China studies. Some scholars have conducted intriguing investigations into some seemingly apolitical digital volunteering practices, such as the Maker Movement ²³ and online translation communities (字幕组). ²⁴ These studies reveal that the politics of such cyberactivism is characterized by proactively engaging and maintaining proper distance with the state or by developing self-governing mechanisms and turning fandom into civic engagement.

Drawing on the insights from the above literature of the political effects of web-based ICTs on civic engagement and state–society relations, this article extends the study of China’s state–civil society relationship. This research examines the combination of the newly released politically empowering effects of the Internet and the creativity of social actors. Using the practice of crisis crowdsourcing as a case study, this article shows that the application of web-based ICTs combining with the rise of online mass-based activism can generate a new sphere for public participation and community building independent of the state, and facilitate the emergence of a disaster response system parallel to the government relief agencies. It also shows that the cooperation between the state and social organizations is the result of proactively pushing forward and negotiation on the part of the social actors. Through a series of effective disaster response operations based on self-capacity building, the social actors concerned have demonstrated their comparative advantages in information management and service delivery, and make the state feel the necessity to cooperate with and even rely on social organizations in disaster management.

This research is based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2016. I interviewed more than 20 activists and volunteers participating in crowdsourcing efforts and staff of relief NGOs and private charities. I also attended offline and online meetings, workshops, and training programmes organized by NGOs, private foundations, and online activists. Popular social media platforms such as SinaWeibo and Douban provide a lot of traceable information and were used to collate the first-hand data collected from interviews.

This research focuses on civic response to a particular type of natural disaster, namely earthquake, because it is the most deadly and fearsome type of disaster in China. The 1976 Tangshan earthquake, one of the most fatal natural disasters in modern history that buried over 240,000 people overnight, is still at the root of terror of earthquakes in China. The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, one of the most devastating disasters in the 21st century, claimed more than 80,000 lives and caused huge economic loss. The lethalness and destructiveness of earthquakes in China emerge from the combined effects of a large network of fault lines, poverty, crowded cities, and lax building codes. Earthquakes are more likely to trigger massive state-led disaster responses and arouse intensive public concern. The three earthquakes selected for study in this article not only caused severe casualties and massive devastation, but also triggered large-scale emergency responses which directly mobilized the central government and nation-wide volunteering, including: digitally enabled voluntarism in disaster management.

The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake: Emergence of volunteered crisis crowdsourcing

The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake witnessed the evolution of digital civic engagement in disaster management. The massive social response to this devastating catastrophe not only saw the earliest large-scale deployment of Web 2.0 services, such as instant messaging tools and social networking sites, but also gave rise to the practices of crowdsourcing disaster information and disaster mapping in China.

Such digital civic efforts originated from popular social networking services such as Tencent QQ groups (a Chinese commercial instant messaging service) and Douban. Immediately after the Wenchuan earthquake, a volunteer group on QQ called ‘Home of the volunteers’ was activated to disseminate information concerning the needs of the impact areas and to coordinate delivery of relief supplies to the affected areas. In this process, some members of this online voluntary group recognized the importance of instant and relevant information on the ground for more efficient and effective disaster relief, and they began to add volunteers and staff of NGOs working in the affected areas into the QQ group. The online community then turned to a coordinating platform connecting large numbers of relief workers, volunteers and resources inside and outside of the disaster areas. At its peak, this virtual community rallied over 200 active volunteers and coordinated more than one-third of the civic organizations participating in disaster relief in Sichuan. ²⁵

Douban, an influential social networking website in China, was another important locus for the early practice of crisis crowdsourcing in China. Within hours of the mega quake, a volunteer team with around 20 members, mostly college students, was formed on Douban and they worked closely with engineers from Google Earth to produce up-to-date crisis maps. The Douban team collected and collated information related to damage, needs, and aid delivery from various cyberspaces such as blogs, QQ groups of relief workers and organizations, and even websites of local radio stations. Such processed data was then categorized and tagged on Google Maps with different symbols. At that point in time the platform of Google Earth could only support 40 tag editing each day, so the volunteers of the Douban team circulated the rest of the untagged disaster messages on various social networking platforms and even Baidu.com, the leading search engine in China, to facilitate the dissemination of up-to-date information on the affected areas. ²⁶

The real impacts of these informal and ad hoc volunteered efforts were unclear because of insufficient data. Given the fact that mobile devices were not widespread in 2008 and that China’s incipient civil society actors were still not familiar with Web 2.0 technologies and were unaware of the importance and potential of these web-based ICTs to achieve organizational and political goals, the actual influences of such online activism should not be exaggerated. But such bottom–up efforts of volunteered crisis crowdsourcing in response to the mega quake did leave some important legacies for the development of digital disaster management in China. First, these initially informal and even improvisational volunteered efforts gave rise to a digital volunteer community familiar with and committed to peer production of disaster information mediated by web-based ICTs, which laid the foundation for the evolution of a more specialized and formalized field of work in the emerging sector of civic disaster management. Second, based on the successful collaboration in disaster information management during the Wenchuan earthquake relief operation, the loosely connected crowdsourcing community and other action-oriented grass-roots civic organizations began to get acquainted with each other, build up mutual trust, and pave the way for more regular and extensive interactions between online and offline activism in civic responses to disasters in the future.

The 2010 Yushu earthquake: Integrating volunteer crowdsourcing with NGO networks

The 2010 Yushu earthquake caused much fewer casualties and economic losses than the Wenchuan earthquake, but as collective memories of the catastrophe in 2008 were still fresh and volunteer enthusiasm had not receded, this disaster still triggered trigger another massive wave of public participation in disaster relief. Although the scale of citizen engagement in the Yushu earthquake relief was much smaller than that of the Wenchuan earthquake, partially because of a lower degree of severity and partially because of the re-imposition of political constraints, it still provided important impetus for the development of volunteer crisis crowdsourcing in China. The significance of crowdsourcing in the Yushu earthquake was manifested more in organizational and political aspects than in the technological dimension. Technologically speaking, disaster information crowdsourcing in response to the Yushu earthquake was actually more ‘backward’ than the similar efforts after the Wenchuan earthquake, because it fell short of the active involvement of the professional mapping communities and therefore failed to generate visualized disaster maps. But the Yushu earthquake was an important milestone for the evolution of China’s crisis crowdsourcing and the more general development of citizen-based disaster response because it witnessed conscious organizational and operational integration between the web-based crisis crowdsourcing community and the networks of grass-roots NGOs engaging in disaster relief.

The disaster information crowdsourcing after the Yushu earthquake was initiated and coordinated by the same group of activists participating in the volunteered digital disaster management after the Wenchuan earthquake. Built upon the experience and skills acquired in 2008, the efforts of crowdsourcing in response to the Yushu earthquake were better planned and the process of data mining was more streamlined. Within hours of the earthquake, the virtual community had started recruiting volunteers and crowdsourcing disaster information collection via QQ and other major social networking platforms. Unlike the crowdsourcing efforts in 2008 that had been independently organized by cyber activists, the leading activists of the digital disaster management of the Yushu earthquake joined an NGO coalition called the Huaxia Commonwealth Service Centre (hereafter Huaxia Centre) and the massive relief efforts collectively carried out by its members. The crowdsourcing team opened a special forum on the website of Huaxia Centre to publicize information about damages and relief needs in the affected areas and coordinate aid delivery of members of Huaxia Centre and even other social groups and volunteers participating in disaster relief. Such data was mainly collected through two social networks. The first was an online alumni association run by Qinghai students and white collars based in Beijing. This virtual community recruited volunteers who could speak Tibetan dialect among fellow Qinghai provincials via various social networking platforms. These volunteers were responsible for translating requests collected from the affected communities into Mandarin Chinese before such information was outsourced to be processed and analyzed. ²⁷

The other important source of disaster information was an alliance of civic outdoor rescue teams called Blue Sky Rescue. This association originated from the voluntary search-and-rescue services provided by the newly developed backpacking communities based in big cities. Such civil association had become increasingly specialized and formalized, and had evolved into civic rescue teams with nation-wide membership and networks. Because of their quasi-professional training in outdoor rescue and strong fundraising capacity due to a predominantly urban middle-class membership, the networks of civic rescue teams had become important actors within China’s emerging civic disaster response system since the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. The area of the epicentre of the Yushu earthquake had been renowned for its magnificent landscape, becoming an attractive destination for many Chinese backpacking enthusiasts. Therefore, many civic rescue team alliances like Blue Sky Rescue had already established networks of logistic stations and volunteers in this region before the earthquake. After the digital disaster response was initiated, the members of these social groups, as first responders on the ground, could not only collect reliable first-hand information on the affected communities but also help verify and improve the accuracy of the crowdsourced information. ²⁸

The collaboration between the digital crowdsourcing community and other networked civic forces were actually not new for citizen-based disaster response in China. Similar phenomena had already surfaced during the Wenchuan earthquake relief and provided important momentum for the emergence of a non-governmental relief sector. ²⁹ But what distinguished the collaboration between the digital volunteer community and other relief NGO networks after the Yushu earthquake was a more conscious move made by social actors driven by both shared experience in response to the Wenchuan earthquake and realistic mutual benefit. For cyber activists, they were eager to turn what they learned from the Wenchuan earthquake relief into replicable toolkits and to develop more efficient tactics of digital disaster information management.

To achieve these goals, the crowdsourcing community needed NGOs to practise and test the methods of information collection and communication on the ground. For NGOs, better quality of information means more efficient and effective relief. Such mutuality between the online and offline relief communities was best manifested in the partnership between the voluntary crowdsourcing team and Huaxia Centre. This inclusive coalition of Huaxia Centre was initiated and led by several open-minded philanthropists who have been active in supporting innovative initiatives from grass-roots civic actors. They turned Huaxia Centre into an incubator for new social organizations by providing seed funding and capacity building projects. Zhuoming Disaster Information Service Centre (hereafter Zhuoming Centre) and its crowd work, regarded by the leaders of Huaxia Centre as a promising part of its growing disaster response system, gained substantial support from this NGO coalition. Huaxia Centre leaders put Zhuoming Centre in charge of the mission of disaster information management and offered the crowdsourcing team an efficient platform to collaborate with social responders working on the ground. Such collaboration not only provided an effective learning opportunity for the practitioners of crisis crowdsourcing in the disaster situations, but also facilitated the evolution of digital volunteering by integrating the informal and loosely bound volunteer community into a more formal civil society sector. After the Yushu earthquake, in non-crisis situations, the crowdsourcing community maintained and enhanced its networking with the virtual and realistic webs of grass-roots NGOs under the umbrella platform of Huaxia Centre, especially the member groups based in the disaster-prone areas. Such interactions between online and offline activism accumulated mutual trust and interpersonal connections that could support more effective collective action and provide more reliable sources of information and data verification mechanisms for the crowdsourcing community. ³⁰

The mutual reinforcement and co-evolution of the crowdsourcing community and the action-oriented NGO networks have provided much needed impetus for the overall development of the non-governmental disaster sector. Contradicting many optimistic predictions, the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake did not lead to a smooth development of China’s civil society. After a situational opening of political space by the state in 2008, the years following the Wenchuan earthquake witnessed re-intensified government control over information, social donation, and autonomous citizen participation in disaster response. ³¹ Facing various kinds of policy and political adversity, many social actors left the field of disaster response, and those committed to establishing a new field of work had to find more effective strategies for survival and growth. Among these strategies, building broad-based networking and information crowdsourcing, and the combination of both, were of particular importance.

In the years after the Yushu earthquake, several regional and even nation-wide relief NGO networks emerged and some of the social organizations from these networks were among the first to continue experimenting with the techniques of crisis crowdsourcing in collective responses to small and medium disasters. In this process, despite unfavourable social and political conditions, social actors engaging in disaster relief, including those committed to web-based crowdsourcing, were able to keep the civil relief community growing, measured not merely by the number of participant organizations, but also by the geographic spread, complexity of division of labour, and frequency of collaborative operations. ³²

The 2013 Lushan earthquake: The rise of crowd organizations

The 2013 Lushan earthquake was the most devastating natural disaster that had affected China since the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. This catastrophe also marked a new turning point for volunteered disaster information crowdsourcing in China. The significance of the Lushan earthquake for this specific type of cyberactivism was twofold. First, this disaster saw the rise of more formalized ‘crowd organizations’, ³³ such as Zhuoming Centre and Yiyun Social Innovation Centre (hereafter Yiyun Centre), that focus on disaster information management and use crowdsourcing as a primary means of problem-solving and service provision. Second, the emergence of more formal and structured crowdsourcing efforts facilitated more intensive interactions between the online and offline activism in response to disasters. The co-evolution and deepened integration of web-based crowdsourcing community and the action-oriented relief NGOs have made information crowdsourcing a stable institutional feature of the emerging civic disaster management in China.

Zhuoming Centre and Yiyun Centre represent a new form of civil association enabled by Web 2.0 technologies. For such kinds of actors, conventional organizational structures are not relevant and the Internet is not merely an instrument to solve technical problems. Rather than simply a tool for enhancing managerial efficiency or resource mobilization capacity, the Internet has become ‘the primary locus of their institutional existence’. ³⁴ Zhuoming Centre originated from online volunteer groups participating in the earliest disaster crowdsourcing efforts after the Wenchuan earthquake, and evolved into a more stable and formal team in the citizen-based disaster response to the Yushu earthquake in 2010. The name Zhuoming was taken from the fictional valley in the Hollywood blockbuster 2012, implying shelter from disasters and hope for a brighter future.

Zhuoming Centre is specialized in disaster information collection and assessment, and its main service is disaster assessment publicized in the form of briefings or news-letters. Zhuoming Centre has maintained a very small team of standing members; most of its work, such as information collection and processing, is outsourced to a large number of volunteers recruited online. Zhuoming Centre rapidly improved its skills and capacity in data mining by continuously participating in civic responses to various types of disasters between 2011 and 2012. The most important progress of Zhuoming Centre’s crowd-based disaster information management was the establishment of a set of standard operating procedures for data mining that enabled online volunteers without much prior training to rapidly locate the ‘black spots’ ³⁵ in the affected area and guide the aid to the unmet needs more effectively. ³⁶ With such an innovative technique, Zhuoming Centre can improve the precision of crisis decision-making and aid delivery of relief NGOs.

Yiyun Centre is a non-profit organization established by a cybersecurity specialist to provide cloud solutions for philanthropic groups. One of Yiyun Centre’s products was the interactive geo mapping service tailor-made for civic organizations. Yiyun Centre began to provide crisis mapping services for civic actors in 2012, but more sophisticated and large-scale deployment appeared in the aftermath of the Lushan earthquake. Although the mapping platform used by Yiyun was not open-sourced, the process of production of the Yiyun maps is typically crowd-based and reflects the advantage of peer production and collective wisdom. Immediately after the earthquake, Yiyun formed a collaborative network with a group of activists from private foundations and grass-roots NGOs to support its efforts of crisis mapping. Activists from those civic organizations helped Yiyun recruit and train online volunteers to collect information, and Yiyun was responsible for data analysis and visualization. Yiyun also outsourced the task of developing a mobile mapping application to ‘geeky’ volunteers active on cyberspace. The prototype of this application, later known as Signal Flare (信号弹), was launched online the second day of the quake and allowed users, including individuals and organizations inside and outside of the affected areas, to transmit geospatial information and short messages showing damage, needs, and aid delivery onto the interactive map publicly available on the website of Yiyun Centre. Similar to Zhuoming Centre, most of Yiyun Centre’s administrative work was accomplished via social media and other web-based ICT tools. The key activists in charge of volunteer recruitment, training, and inter-organizational communication of the Yiyun mapping project, located in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shenzhen, worked closely for two weeks throughout the emergency phase without meeting each other face-to-face. ³⁷

Besides the rise of specialized crowd organizations such as Zhuoming Centre and Yiyun Centre, another important legacy of the social response to the Lushan earthquake was that crisis crowdsourcing had become a more regular and integral component of the civic disaster management. As shown by China’s growing social response to natural and even human-induced disasters at home and abroad in the years following the Lushan earthquake, such as the 2014 Ludian earthquake, the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the 2016 Ecuador earthquake, and the chemical blast in Tianjin in 2015, volunteered collective production of crisis information and geo mapping mediated by Web 2.0 applications have become regular components of China’s disaster management. Such change was a result of co-evolution and increased integration of the emerging disaster information crowdsourcing communities and private foundations and action-oriented relief NGOs and their increasingly networked partnerships.

Both Zhuoming Centre and Yiyun Centre became members of the coalition of Huaxia Centre, and they cooperated with each other on disaster mapping during the phase of emergency response to the Lushan earthquake. Zhuoming Centre provided verified and semi-structured disaster information for Yiyun Centre, and the latter transformed such data into visualized geotags on the web maps. The chief coordinator of Yiyun Centre’s volunteer teams also attended the daily online meetings organized by Zhuoming at the stage of emergency response, usually lasting for 10 to 14 days after the disaster. ³⁸ A diverse group of NGOs, foundations, and other civic actors were invited to the meetings to share their experiences of aid delivery and, more importantly, evaluate the co-production of disaster assessment and crisis mapping organized by relief groups on the frontlines and the volunteers working on the social media space. These meetings not only facilitated coordination between online and offline efforts in information management but also offered collective learning opportunities for civic actors participating in disaster relief.

Built upon more extensive NGO and volunteer collaboration enabled by ICTs, the Yiyun Centre maps were more interactive and user-friendly than the Google Maps deployed in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, displaying more comprehensive information about both relief needs and aid. On the third day of the earthquake, more than 10,000 users were recorded downloading the Yiyun mobile application and more than 480 on-the-ground pieces of information were tagged on the disaster map. ³⁹ According to the information collected from the field, besides members of Huaxia Centre, many civic rescue teams and relief NGOs from the more resourceful and professional coalitions such as Blue Sky Rescue and One Foundation’s United Disaster Relief also participated in the efforts of disaster mapping, or used the visualized information on the Yiyun maps to support their relief operation.

Given the fact that a major barrier for effective civic engagement in disaster response in China has been the state monopoly of disaster information, the development and institutionalization of crisis crowdsourcing has provided new and independent channels of critical information for effective citizen-based response. More importantly, supported by the independently acquired disaster information, civic forces have empowered the affected people within the disaster space by bringing them into the process of decision-making, enabling them to make direct contributions to the relief efforts and even help other trapped people in the affected areas.

Discussion: Political constraints and adaptation of the social actors in digital disaster response

The foregoing sections have examined the collective efforts made by various social actors to develop the method and technologies of crisis crowdsourcing and consistently apply them to citizen-based disaster response in the last few years. Focusing on the inputs from social actors does not mean that the author overlooks the existence of the party-state as a powerful set of structures shaping social lives. In fact, the co-evolution of online and offline activism and its institutional outcomes in disaster response in China has been profoundly shaped by the political constraints imposed by the authoritarian party-state and therefore endows the non-governmental disaster sector with distinctive organizational features unseen in other countries.

The Chinese government has been suspicious of the development of civic organizations with political pursuits but tolerant of the existence and even growth of apolitical and service-oriented social organizations. ⁴⁰ In recent decades, the Chinese government has even consciously encouraged the development of social organizations to supplement the state’s role in public service provision. ⁴¹ Against such a background, social organizations with strong expertise and technical skills but weak political orientation, such as outdoor rescue teams and NGOs delivering relief aids, are more likely to be tolerated and became important actors in the emerging civil disaster sector.

Political constraints of the authoritarian state have even limited the technological choices and operational style of social actors engaging in crisis crowdsourcing and more general participation in disaster response. Although the response to the Wenchuan earthquake gave rise to one of the earliest efforts of crisis mapping in the world, such social initiatives had not turned into long-term development of regular volunteered mapping, as happened in the United States after the Haitian earthquake. An important reason for the underdevelopment of crisis mapping in China is that the Chinese government bans private mapping and makes the efforts of volunteered mapping unlawful. Such regulatory constraint creates a major barrier for the application of open-source mapping tools in citizen-based disaster response and compels the practitioners of crisis crowdsourcing to use commercial mapping platforms to display crowdsourced data.

State censorship not only creates technical barriers for the development of crowdsourcing technologies but also hinders networking between professional volunteers or techno-activists, especially those with strong IT and geographic information system knowledge, and other social actors engaging in disaster management in China. The rise of crowd organizations such as Yiyun and Zhuoming have provided new impetus for the collaboration between the digital volunteer community and more professional networks of IT specialists, but it will still take time to see the emergence of a stable mapping community in this civil society sector.

However, recognizing the constraints of the state does not dismiss the proactive adaptability of social actors and the autonomy of the newly developed social disaster management sector. As shown by the case studies in this article, crowdsourcing of disaster information emerged as ad hoc and even improvisational volunteering in the aftermath of the Wenchuan earthquake. The formalization of such a loosely connected volunteer network was achieved through conscious and collective efforts of enthusiastic activists and visionary NGOs and foundations, such as collaborative responses to low-intensity disasters, organizing online and offline capacity building projects, and even more sophisticated efforts of establishing voluntary information disclosure mechanism. More importantly, Chinese social actors have responded positively to the political and technologically restrictive environment by applying other web-based ICTs and, most importantly, relying on the extensive networks of grass-roots NGOs to push forward the development of crisis crowdsourcing and even the overall domain of non-governmental disaster response.

The combination of volunteered disaster information crowdsourcing and NGO-led operation first emerged in the aftermath of the Wenchuan earthquake, initially as spontaneous activities of social actors to solve the communication problem between the affected communities and responders in the big cities and improve the efficiency of aid delivery. In the social response to the 2010 Yushu earthquake, the collaboration between the online and offline communities became more planned and sophisticated. But the institutionalized online–offline collaboration after the Yushu earthquake only occurred between the crowdsourcing community and a handful of NGO coalitions and the efforts and value of crisis crowdsourcing remained unknown to many social organizations participating in relief operation. The next important change took place in 2011, as leading private foundations such as YouChange, Narada, and the newly established One Foundation began to push forward the building of regional and even nationwide networks of grass-roots NGOs specialized in disaster relief. As the leading activists of the crowdsourcing community participated in the process of preparation and actual building of some these networks, these broad-based NGO partnerships then became new channels for the collaboration between action-oriented organizations and the digital crowdsourcing community in disaster response. Several broad-based relief NGO networks emerged between 2011 and 2013, and they shared important commonalities in the multi-layered organizational structure and indigenous membership, mainly consisting of county-level volunteer groups and philanthropic organizations from the disaster-prone regions in China. ⁴² The establishment of such extensive NGO networks is an important innovation of Chinese social organizations in response to the geographic spread of vulnerable communities and lack of reliable sources of information to support quick and effective response. Such networks of action-oriented social organizations, although not so digital, have provided a perfect organizational infrastructure for the digital crowdsourcing community to effectively coordinate information collection and verification.

As shown by the disaster response to a series of disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and typhoons between 2013 and 2015, the combination of the extensive NGO networks and the more professionalized crowdsourcing community could support relief delivery more rapidly and accurately than the government agencies on many occasions. More importantly, the system of information crowdsourcing, including the more sophisticated efforts of crisis mapping in the response to the 2013 Lushan earthquake, has shown the power of social forces enabled by the new information technologies, while making the government relief system look obsolete in disaster information management and crisis communication. All these successful social efforts in disaster response through proactive self-capacity building and self-organization have not only improved the public legitimacy of the whole non-governmental disaster sector but also gained acceptance with the government. After 2013, impressed by the successful experiences of the grass-roots, some government-organized NGOs (GONGO) such as China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation and China Charity Alliance also established their own networks of relief NGOs and carried out crowd-based disaster information management. The structural and organizational features of these government-led networks share a lot of similarities with the grass-roots version. For instance, these GONGOs have absorbed many grass-roots social groups into their networks rather than simply relying on their local affiliations. They have also relied on the webs of local partners to collect information and produce user-generated disaster reports in crisis response. And these state actors actively learned from the social forces by inviting grass-roots organizations to provide training programmes and carrying out a joint response to disasters. For social actors, participating in these GONGO-led platforms allows them to share the organizational and even financial resources of the state without sacrificing their own autonomy.

Conclusion

Since crisis crowdsourcing is still in its infancy in China, this research does not purport to overestimate the significance of this newly developed phenomenon and paint a rosy picture of this emerging digital civic engagement in China. Actually, the evolution of crisis crowdsourcing, both as a problem-solving model and a form of civil association, has encountered a lot of challenges from within and outside of the grass-roots disaster management communities. Besides common problems faced by most of the civil society actors in China, such as low public awareness, shortage of funding, insufficient expertise, and lack of public legitimacy, the development of crisis crowdsourcing in China is also hindered by the lack of support from a stable community of mapping specialists and the underdevelopment of open-source mapping platforms. Leading crowd organizations such as Zhuoming Centre and Yiyun Centre are still reliant on the commercial mapping platforms to carry out crowd work. Such partnership has been inconsistent, if not unreliable, because the commercial actors have to consider the legal and political risks of participatory private mapping. A more serious problem is that the lack of open-source platforms has led to a monopoly on sources of information and channels for information dissemination and caused conflicts within the crowdsourcing community. This is an important reason underlying the breakup of Zhuoming Centre and Yiyun Centre, the most important actors in the crisis crowdsourcing community, after the response to the Ludian earthquake in 2014. Since then, Yiyun Centre’s presence and the efforts of crisis mapping in China’s civic disaster response have consistently declined. However, Zhuoming Centre continues to play an active role in feeding the civic relief efforts with crowdsourced disaster reports. It became even more influential in the disaster sector after participating in the unprecedented civic response to international disasters, such as the 2015 Nepal earthquake and the 2016 Ecuador earthquake. Zhuoming Centre manages to provide its own disaster mapping service by recruiting geographic information system specialists and applying open-source mapping tools while evading state restrictions.

In spite of these problems, thanks to the consistent and extensive cooperation between cyber crowdsourcing actors and other civic organizations engaging in disaster management over the past few years, the skills of web-based disaster information management are beginning to spread within the non-governmental sector. In response to recent disasters at home and abroad, a growing number of relief organizations, including both grass-roots and state-run organizations such as Amity Foundation and China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, have carried out increasingly sophisticated and participatory disaster information management, and publicized their own briefings containing information collected from the affected communities with local networks of partners.

After years of practice and continued efforts at collaboration, although China still lacks vibrant and highly professional volunteer and technical communities, the volunteered crowdsourcing community has become more stabilized and the methodology of crowdsourcing mediated by web-based ICT has become an increasingly regular component of China’s citizen participation in disaster response. More importantly, after years of simultaneous development of cyber crowdsourcing and professional relief NGOs, the: peer production of actionable disaster information and crowdsourced disaster management has become a signature feature of China’s citizen-based disaster management. With this we witness the emergence of a different form of grass-roots disaster management that is independent from the state-led disaster response in terms of skills, expertise, content of services, and, more fundamentally, the identification of service providers and recipients.