Geographical magazine: The Future of Mapping

The Geographical magazine, which is the official magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, run an article about "the future of mapping". The piece was written by Katie Burton, and it covers a range of recent developments in mapping technologies. I was interviewed for the piece, and provided information about our work with Sapelli, and also comments … Continue reading Geographical magazine: The Future of Mapping

Advertisement

Citizen Science @ Computational Foundry, Swansea, Festival of Ideas

The Computational Foundry at the Swansea University organised two days "Festival of Ideas" as part of the activities to celebrate its opening. The first day was organised by Ben Shneiderman and focused on aspects of AI, while the second day, curated by Jenny Preece, focused on citizen science. The summary here is from the second day, … Continue reading Citizen Science @ Computational Foundry, Swansea, Festival of Ideas

Citizen Science 2019: Designing technology to maximize cultural diversity, uptake, and outcomes of citizen science

  This blog post was written by Michelle Neil of ACSA with edits by me (yay! collaborative note taking!) (apologies for getting names wrong!)  The session was structured in the following way: first, each person presented their issue, and then they answer questions that were presented by other panel members. The questions that we managed … Continue reading Citizen Science 2019: Designing technology to maximize cultural diversity, uptake, and outcomes of citizen science

10 years of Mapping for Change

November 24 marks 10 years since Louise Francs, Chris Church and myself set up Mapping for Change. It's a proud moment when the social enterprise that was set out of a research project at UCL is now well established, and the work that it does is mentioned in the annual report of the Chief Medical … Continue reading 10 years of Mapping for Change

Developing mobile applications for environmental and biodiversity citizen science: considerations and recommendations

The first outcome of the December 2016 workshop on apps, platforms, and portals for citizen science projects was the open access paper "Defining principles for mobile apps and platforms development in citizen science", which came out in October 2017. The workshop, which was organised by Soledad Luna and Ulrike Sturm from the Berlin Museum for Natural History, has … Continue reading Developing mobile applications for environmental and biodiversity citizen science: considerations and recommendations

Identifying success factors in crowdsourced geographic information use in government

A few weeks ago, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), published an update for the report from 2014 on the use of crowdsourced geographic information in government. The 2014 report was very successful - it has been downloaded almost 1,800 times from 41 countries around the world in about 3 years (with more … Continue reading Identifying success factors in crowdsourced geographic information use in government

Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science – Afternoon session

The context of the workshop and the notes from the first part of the workshop is available here. The theme of the second part of the day was Interacting with geographical citizen science: lessons learned from urban environments Volunteer interactions with flood crowdsourcing platforms - Avi Baruch talk is based on a completed PhD on the aspects of volunteers … Continue reading Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science – Afternoon session

Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science – Morning session

On the 27th April, UCL hosted a workshop on the "Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science". The workshop description was as follows: "A decade ago, in 2007, Michael Goodchild defined volunteered geographic information (VGI) as ‘the widespread engagement of large numbers of private citizens, often with little in the way of formal … Continue reading Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science – Morning session

Citizen Science & Scientific Crowdsourcing – week 3 – Participation inequality

One of the aspects that fascinates me about citizen science and crowdsourcing is the nature of participation and in particular participation inequality. As I've noted last week, when you look at large scale systems, you expected to see it in them (so Google Local Guides is exhibiting 95:5:0.005 ratio). I knew that this phenomenon has been … Continue reading Citizen Science & Scientific Crowdsourcing – week 3 – Participation inequality

Citizen Science & Scientific Crowdsourcing – week 2 – Google Local Guides

The first week of the "Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing" course was dedicated to an introduction to the field of citizen science using the history, examples and typologies to demonstrate the breadth of the field. The second week was dedicated to the second half of the course name - crowdsourcing in general, and its … Continue reading Citizen Science & Scientific Crowdsourcing – week 2 – Google Local Guides