The Guardian Science Weekly podcast is dedicated to Citizen Science – another example of the growing interest in popular media in Citizen Science. However, the podcast conflate cases were non-professional scientists are involved in scientific project (and Chris Lintott discuss Galaxy Zoo, FoldIt and similar projects) with participation in scientific research through surveys. It is rather interesting that George MacKerron is usually explaining that Mappiness, despite the wide participation in it, is a social survey tool and not a citizen science project. It is also not strictly crowd-sourcing project, so calling the chronotype survey a crowd-sourced science, as the podcast does, is a bit of a hype…
Horizon’s ‘Supporting the contextual footprint – Infrastructure Challenges’ presentation
20 March, 2010
The Digital Economy is a research programme of Research Council UK, and as part of it the University of Nottingham is running the Horizon Digital Economy research centre. The institute organised a set of theme days, and the latest one focused on ‘supporting the contextual footprint – infrastructure challenges‘. The day was excellent, covering issues such as background on location issues with a review of location technology and a demonstration of car pooling application, data ownership, privacy and control over your information and finally crowdsourcing. I was asked to give a presentation with a bit of background on OpenStreetMap, discuss the motivation of contributors and mention the business models that are based on open geographical information.
For the purpose of this demonstration, I teamed with Nama Raj Budhathoki who is completing his PhD research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Zorica Nedović-Budić (now at University College Dublin). His research focuses on user-generated geographical information, and just before Christmas he run a survey of OpenStreetMap contributors, and I was involved in the design of the questionnaire (as well as being lucky enough to be on Nama’s advisory committee).
So here is the presentation and we plan to give more comprehensive feedback on the survey during State of the Map 2010.
Volunteered Geographical Information Research Network
17 July, 2009
Chris Parker, a PhD student at Loughborough University, organised a dedicated Volunteered Geographical Information research group site on ResearchGate. While I dislike the term – I usually interpret it as the version of ‘volunteered’ as in ‘mum volunteered me to help the old lady cross the street’ – there is no point in trying to change it. When Mike Goodchild coins an acronym, it will stick; it’s sort of a GIScience law!
If you are interested in user-generated geographical content, crowdsourced geographical information, commons-based peer-produced geographical information, or any other way to call this phenomena (for example VGI) – join the group. It will be good to keep in touch, share information and discuss research aspects.
If you are researching in this area you are also welcome to submit a paper to GISRUK 2010 which will be hosted at UCL – we are keen to have a VGI element in the programme, considering that UCL is the host of OpenStreetMap .
