When volunteer mobilization outpaces coordination: workflow repair in disaster response

Abstract

This study examines what happens when rapid volunteer mobilization expands faster than the capacity to organize heterogeneous people, information, resources and tasks during disaster response. The study uses a single embedded qualitative process design centered on a rapidly scaled, messaging-mediated volunteer response following a September 2025 barrier-lake flood in eastern Taiwan. The primary process evidence consists of contemporaneous records from the focal coordination group, supplemented by targeted traces from task-specific subgroups, two public forums, nine semi-structured interviews, five fieldnote-based observations and open-ended volunteer accounts. Mobilization-generated coordination strain became visible through repeated verification, misrouting, uneven task allocation, stale or ambiguous requests and situations in which volunteers or resources accumulated in some locations while remaining needed elsewhere. The analysis identifies three recurrent forms of workflow repair: functional differentiation, boundary regulation and intermediary translation. These practices were observably enacted and reused, but repair remained partial, uneven and subject to changing task demand, participant learning, formal intervention and safety constraints. The study distinguishes the capacity to mobilize help from the capacity to organize what has been mobilized. It conceptualizes workflow repair as an episode-level, problem-triggered process linking an identifiable coordination breakdown to targeted reconfiguration of an already operating workflow, observable uptake or reuse and a bounded process consequence or incomplete repair after volunteer mobilization has already scaled.