Knowledge Transfer Champion for Social Enterprise

At the end of 2010, UCL’s Office of the Vice-Provost (Enterprise) ran an internal competition to identify several Knowledge Transfer (KT) Champions across the institute.

‘KT Champions will distinguish themselves as leaders of knowledge transfer and research impact within their field, and contribute to UCL’s enterprise strategy as a whole… The activities of a KT Champion will include: (i) leading others through their own knowledge transfer work; (ii) building an understanding of opportunities and relations within their area and facilitating the growth of projects and partnerships; and (iii) supporting colleagues in developing their own knowledge transfer portfolios. KT Champions will be proactive and visionary in working with their counterparts and UCL Enterprise to develop the UCL enterprise strategy.’

Based on my work in setting up Mapping for Change and securing the UnLtd HE Development Award, I felt it was important that the area of Social Enterprise will be represented within the range of activities that KT Champions cover.

After a successful application, I am starting 2011 as the KT Champion in the area of Social Enterprise. During the coming year, I aim to develop this area within the wider UCL community. The activities that will be carried out over the year include: an implementation plan based on the findings from the Perception Mapping project in which the community that surrounds UCL told us what connection they would like to have with UCL; identifying existing third sector work at UCL – publicising it,  understanding barriers to growth and devising solutions; running a Social Enterprise ‘clinic’, with widely published opening times, to assist any member of the UCL community to start a social enterprise; and extending the activities of Mapping for Change.

During the launch of the programme, I was approached with questions about the concept of Social Enterprise, and my experience of establishing one, so I guess that it is going to be a busy year.

For more information about the UCL Knowledge Transfer Champions programme, see here.

GIS Systems ?!? from acronym to a term…

Yesterday, for the first time, I came across the phrase ‘GIS Systems’ in an academic paper, written by geographers (not GIS experts). I have also noticed that the term is being used more often in recent times when people talk about packages such as ArcGIS or Mapinfo.

On the face of it, talking about a ‘GIS System’ is ridiculous – how can you say ‘geographic information system system’? However, people have a reason for using this phrase and it makes some sense to them.

Maybe the reason is that GIS now stands for a class or type of computer software that can manage, manipulate and visualise geographic information, so GIS system is the specific hardware and software that is used. Personally, I’ll continue to find it odd and use GIS for what it is…

How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map An Area Well? The validity of Linus’ law to Volunteered Geographic Information

The paper “How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map An Area Well? The validity of Linus’ law to Volunteered Geographic Information“ has appeared in The Cartographic Journal. The proper citation for the paper is:

Haklay, M and Basiouka, S and Antoniou, V and Ather, A (2010) How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map An Area Well? The validity of Linus’ law to Volunteered Geographic Information. The Cartographic Journal , 47 (4) , 315 – 322.

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

In the area of volunteered geographical information (VGI), the issue of spatial data quality is a clear challenge. The data that are contributed to VGI projects do not comply with standard spatial data quality assurance procedures, and the contributors operate without central coordination and strict data collection frameworks. However, similar to the area of open source software development, it is suggested that the data hold an intrinsic quality assurance measure through the analysis of the number of contributors who have worked on a given spatial unit. The assumption that as the number of contributors increases so does the quality is known as `Linus’ Law’ within the open source community. This paper describes three studies that were carried out to evaluate this hypothesis for VGI using the OpenStreetMap dataset, showing that this rule indeed applies in the case of positional accuracy.

To access the paper on the journal’s website, you can follow the link: 10.1179/000870410X12911304958827. However, if you don’t hold a subscription to the journal, a postprint of the paper is available at the UCL Discovery repository. If you would like to get hold of the printed version, email me.

EveryAware – Enhanced environmental awareness through social information technologies

Image via Wikipedia

EveryAware is a three-year research project, funded under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

The project’s focus is on the development of Citizen Science techniques to allow people to find out about their local environmental conditions, and then to see if the provision of this information leads to behaviour change.

The abstract of the project highlights the core topics that will be covered:

‘The enforcement of novel policies may be triggered by a grassroots approach, with a key contribution from information and communication technology (ICT). Current low-cost sensing technologies allow the citizens to directly assess the state of the environment; social networking tools allow effective data and opinion collection and real-time information-spreading processes. Moreover theoretical and modelling tools developed by physicists, computer scientists and sociologists allow citizens to analyse, interpret and visualise complex data sets.

‘The proposed project intends to integrate all crucial phases (environmental monitoring, awareness enhancement, behavioural change) in the management of the environment in a unified framework, by creating a new technological platform combining sensing technologies, networking applications and data-processing
tools; the Internet and the existing mobile communication networks will provide the infrastructure hosting this platform, allowing its replication in different times and places. Case studies concerning different numbers of participants will test the scalability of the platform, aiming to involve as many citizens as possible thanks to
low cost and high usability. The integration of participatory sensing with the monitoring of subjective opinions is novel and crucial, as it exposes the mechanisms by which the local perception of an environmental issue, corroborated by quantitative data, evolves into socially-shared opinions, and how the latter, eventually, drives behavioural changes. Enabling this level of transparency critically allows an effective communication of desirable environmental strategies to the general public and to institutional agencies.’

The project will be coordinated by Fondazione ISI (Institute for Scientific Interchange) and the Physics department at Sapienza Università di Roma. Other participants include the L3S Research Center at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität, Hannover, and finally the Environmental Risk and Health unit at the Flemish Institute of Technological Research (VITO).

At UCL, I will run the project together with Dr Claire Ellul. We will focus on Citizen Science, the interaction with mobile phones for data collection and understanding behaviour change. We are looking for a PhD student to work on this project so, if this type of activity is of interest, get it touch.

Mike Goodchild’s NSF talk ‘From Community Mapping to Critical Spatial Thinking’

Interesting talk from Mike Goodchild in a lecture at the US NSF entitled ‘From Community Mapping to Critical Spatial Thinking’. This talk is a good overview of VGI and links it to the understanding of spatial concepts and integrating them into teaching and research.

The interesting issue raised in the talk is the link between the ability of people to use spatial information and the development of spatial thinking. One vivid memory from the first State of the Map conference was a presentation from a person whowas trying to use a simple GPS receiver way beyond what it was capable of doing, and the tough questioning from the audience at the end, basically telling him that he got it wrong and needed to rethink his project. What was clear was that, for people who are engaged in active data collection and tools development, the critical spatial thinking and the understanding of the technology evolved. At the same time, the evidence from end-users of SatNav devices shows a reduction in spatial understanding due to the ‘tunnel vision’ that the user interface promotes.

Significantly, the number of the latter group is larger than the first group. So are we having shallow spatial understanding without critical spatial thinking?