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(Submission #418)
Citizen Observatories aim to collect in-situ observations from the ground through the involvement of citizens. The WeSenseIt project is aimed at developing Citizen Observatories to collectively contribute toward a shared understanding of all water related issues. In this context, citizens and communities are engaged in all aspects of decision making by sharing ideas, opinions, feedback and contributing as sources of data as well. As a part of the project, a large number of technologies have been developed and are currently being used in three use cases, based in different regions of Europe. Many of these generate data that is openly available via the WeSenseIt platform, freely downloadable and shareable. At the same time, a large number of technologies developed within the project are available as open-source tools, downloadable software or mobile applications. The core of the project constitutes a distributed data management platform that exposes a large number of functions via an application programming interface(API). A number of technologies (mobile apps, online web applications, as well as low-cost sensing devices) generate data to be managed in a structured and formalised manner. At the same time, decision support tools in the form of mobile applications, web-based interfaces and dashboards have been developed to visualise and analyse the data being generated. This talk will focus on highlighting the open-source and freely available tools that have been developed within the project, and share how they interact within the WeSenseIt framework. We will also discuss how enthusiasts and hobbyists can use technical plans and build their own low-cost sensors to deploy in their backyards, community spaces or homes. The open data generated within the project will also be showcased and this talk will focus on how the data is used within the Citizen Observatories. The data included in our discussion will have a variety of forms, collected from different sources - e.g. opinions, observations and images submitted by communities, in-situ observations from low-cost sensors, relevant social media snippets, citizen memories for reminiscing daily events and so on. In this talk, we will present some examples of the data collected within the project and discuss how they have been essential to the functioning of the WeSenseIt Citizen Observatories model. Finally, we will present how such tools, technologies and datasets can be helpful to other citizen observatories or citizen science projects.
Topic Area: [2.7] Citizen science/crowd sourcing Abstract Type: Oral Presentation
Comments: Citizen Observatories, Water Management, Open Source
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