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Cited by 6Disaster Management and ResiliencePublic Relations and Crisis CommunicationInformation Systems Theories and Implementation

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Disentangling Affordances of Online Collaboration Tools for Mutual Aid in Emergencies: Insights from the COVID-19 Lockdown

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Zeng, Xiao, Ji, David, Thadani, Dimple R., Li, Boying, Pu, Xiaodie, Cai, Zhao, Chau, Patrick Y. K.·2023·ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
DOI 10.1145/3593056
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Abstract

With the uncertain trajectory of COVID-19 conditions worldwide, there lies the potential for emergencies to arise, abruptly yielding mass social and economic disruption. Gaining insight into how digital technologies may be leveraged for effective emergency response is therefore pertinent. Emergency-induced needs may prompt citizens to organize mutual aid initiatives where people give what they can and get what they need in response. An increasingly prominent technology used for emergency response, online collaboration tools (OCTs), enables the appropriate match between the supply of aid and its relevant demand in mutual aid initiatives by mediating information and interactions between participants. Through analysis of mutual aid cases during the 2022 Shanghai COVID-19 lockdown, this study elucidates the benefits OCTs provide through the lens of affordance theory and identifies five key affordances of OCTs for emergency mutual aid: persistent accessibility, iterative modifiability, structured consolidation and retrieval, multisynchronous participation, and multichannel broadcasting. We illustrate how such affordances are actualized and how their enabling features work across information flow processes, specifically highlighting benefits of software minimalism with implications for practitioners and future software design in emergency situations. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on OCTs and affordances by disentangling its role in emergency responses.

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  • Prior HCI scholarship has largely examined mutual aid in contexts of crisis informatics, focusing on assembled networks that respond to disruptions.

    “Prior HCI scholarship has largely examined mutual aid in contexts of crisis informatics, focusing on assembled networks that respond to disruptions [16, 26, 43, 46, 53, 67].”

    From Infrastructuring as Collective Resistance: How Disabled Students Negotiate Access Through Technology in Universities (2026) · cites this paper as [67]

    Section 2.1 describes mutual aid initiatives as emergent groups of volunteers responding to disruptions caused by emergencies, supporting the claim’s account of crisis-response networks. The Introduction says prior mutual-aid studies also cover peer support groups and activism; it does not establish that HCI scholarship has largely focused on crisis informatics. (LLM, conf=0.82)

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Metadata

Authors
Zeng, X., Ji, D., Thadani, D. R., Li, B., Pu, X., Cai, Z., & Chau, P. Y. K.
Affiliations
University of Nottingham Ningbo China (CN)
ORCID
Venue
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Published
2023-10-26
Volume
14
Issue
4
Pages
1-27
ISSN
  • 2158-656X (ISSN-L)
  • 2158-6578
DOI
10.1145/3593056
OpenAlex
W4367848184
Cited by
6
References
3
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1
FWCI
2.59
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Background (vor)
Locations
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (72101130 and 72102116)
  • Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation (LQ21G030016 and LQ22G020011)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Disaster Management and Resilience
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Public Relations and Crisis Communication
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management Information Systems › Information Systems Theories and Implementation
Keywords
online collaboration tools, mutual aid, emergency response, COVID-19 lockdown, affordance theory, information flow, emergency communication, information retrieval, multi-channel broadcasting

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