A Design Theory for Spontaneous Volunteer Coordination Systems in Disaster Response

Spontaneous volunteers have always played an important role in responding to major disasters. Over the last 20 years, social media and mobile devices have both increased their potential as key players in disaster management and changed the way they organize themselves. However, one main challenge, especially for public authorities and security organizations, is how to integrate such spontaneous volunteers into official disaster management activities to realize their potential. Since several IT systems for coordinating spontaneous volunteers have been proposed and first practical experiences as well as evaluations are already at hand, developing a comprehensive design theory for such IT systems is aim of this paper. The design theory presented is based on interviews and focus groups with practitioners and supported by literature. We illustrate the applicability and usefulness of the developed design theory/principles through an instantiation with the spontaneous volunteer coordination system KUBAS and first exercise results.