Dear Sir or Madam,

Events such as the Central European Floods in 2013 have shown that the collaboration between citizens and authorities can be of high importance during crisis situations. In recognition of this, the EU research project "EmerGent” aims to explore possibilities and concepts for supporting this collaboration through social media and technology. The overall objective of EmerGent is to understand the positive and negative impact of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in emergencies in order to enhance the safety and security of citizens before, during and after emergencies. For this, concepts and technical prototypes will be developed which will enable emergency services to receive information from social networks, to evaluate it and, if applicable, to integrate it into their decision-making processes and emergency responses (for details visit: http://www.fp7-emergent.eu/).

Our project is guided by practical research: First we want to find out what emergency services really need and what the situation is like at the moment via a very short online survey which will only take 5-10 minutes to complete.

We are interested to know whether you have already had experiences in collaborating with citizens via social media, what problems you have experienced, and what you think the role social media could play in future crisis management. Your input and feedback will guide the development of technical prototypes, which we hope will be of relevance to you and your organization and will be further developed through testing and redevelopment.

Please be reassured that your responses to this survey will be anonymous and treated in strictest confidence, and the results of the survey in anonymized form can be accessed on the project website or emailed to you.

We would be very grateful if you would support us in answering our questions:

Please visit http://www.fp7-emergent.eu/survey/