Using classic methods in a networked manner: seeing volunteered spatial information in a bottom-up fashion

摘要

Using new social media and ICT infrastructures for self-organization, more and more citizen networksand business sectors organize themselves voluntarily around sustainability themes. The paper tracesand evaluates one emerging innovation in such bottom-up, networked form of sustainable governance:The use of sensor data by citizen communities. In such ‘bottom-up community initiatives’, the senseddata is published on Internet presenting real-time, web-based GIS maps about issues like noise, airquality or earthquakes. In the study, two particular cases are analyzed to trace the emergence andnetwork operation of such a ‘networked’ geo-information tool in practice: (1) The Airplane MonitorSchiphol and (2) The Groningen earthquake monitor.The paper discusses how in these cases, citizen sensor networks are combining classicalmethodological approaches with enabling infrastructures and data sources. We find the makerscreatively blend classic methods with newly available open data & information technologies. Thetools are working as “social boundary objects,” as information hubs, which co-evolve with andreinforce the power of the citizen initiative as a network. The paper concludes with a discussion of twopropositions: (1) Computer and Internet technology co-evolve with method advancement in planning,and (2) Citizen sensor networks work as embodied method for hypothesis falsification.