Volunteered Geographic Information, Open Data, and Citizen Participation: A Review for Post-seismic Events Reconstruction in Mexico

This work in progress presents the initial idea to support the creation of an online platform that includes and is updated with citizen and volunteer-generated data together with verified data from official sources. Its goal is to help society and government deal with situations when facing an emergency such as the one that occurred in Mexico City on September 19, 2017, after a 7.1-degree earthquake hit the city, causing death, injuries, and damage throughout the city's infrastructure. This proposal draws inspiration from previous experiences in crowdmapping exercises and from the fact that volunteer citizens acted as first respondents on the ground, collected and published in-situ data to social networks and online repositories, verified these crowdsourced data, and put together online portals to broadcast this information to other citizens to make the best decisions as fast as possible in order to direct rescue efforts, people, resources, food, etc., but unfortunately most of these citizen efforts quickly faded away and are no longer operational. Hopefully, in the long run, a more robust platform that brings together different volunteer citizen efforts and governmental points of view will prove useful and effective for disaster emergency management in the city and the country.