Common Sense Community: Scaffolding Mobile Sensing and Analysis for Novice Users

As sensing technologies become increasingly distributed and democratized, citizens and novice users are becoming responsible for the kinds of data collection and analysis that have traditionally been the purview of professional scientists and analysts. Leveraging this citizen engagement effectively, however, requires not only tools for sensing and data collection but also mechanisms for understanding and utilizing input from both novice and expert stakeholders. When successful, this process can result in actionable findings that leverage and engage community members and build on their experiences and observations. We explored this process of knowledge production through several dozen interviews with novice community members, scientists, and regulators as part of the design of a mobile air quality monitoring system. From these interviews, we derived design principles and a framework for describing data collection and knowledge generation in citizen science settings, culminating in the u...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PERVASIVE
• Authors: Wesley Willett, Paul M. Aoki, Neil Kumar, Sushmita Subramanian, Allison Woodruff
• Keywords: Air Quality, Applied Computing, Community Members, Data Collection, PERVASIVE 2010