Platforms to Engage Citizens to Fix their City

In Web 2.0 and beyond – changing the map, anywhere, any device Eamon Walsh describes the basic concept of ICING of providing two-way communications between the citizen and government. The facilities developed in ICING include reporting on issues such as uncollected garbage, or just opinions positive or negative on new parks, etc; collating all this data, analyzing it, and reporting it back to the public, such as in “City Affection Maps”.

There are similar, more humble, projects to provide the ability for citizens to locate the problems they face in their daily lives. For instance, Innaccessible Barcelona provide physical impaired persons with a mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across or FixMyStreet, let people report problems with the street system around where they live. Those are rather compelling scenarios. However, very little (or no) platforms with location as source of communication have reached a scale exceeding a limited amount of citizen (to the exception of platial?). Despite the lack of success, there are still major projects such as ICING or WikiCity that partially assume that spatial annotation is a natural process for a citizen. Moreover, there are limited reports describing the failed studies of spatial annotation. The only one I am familiar was presented at this year’s CHI Mapmover: a case study of design-oriented research into collective expression and constructed publics. More analysis of failures might help revealing the driving factors that would make citizens annotate their city and therefore create engaging location-based systems.

Poetically dumped mattresses located with FixMyStreet (left) and providing evidences of accessibility issues of a store in Barcelona (right).

Relation to my thesis: Observing the emerging applications based on location and location technologies in urban environments and wondering about the factors that can engage citizen to attach information to a location. (+ embracing the constant repair state of a city)