Tag Archives: Jon Corbett

Geothink Summer Institute to Kick-off Monday, June 15, 2015!

The   Environment 3 Building (EV3), at the University of Waterloo, where the summer institute will be held.

The Environment 3 Building (EV3), at the University of Waterloo, where the summer institute will be held.

By Drew Bush

Get ready Geothinkers, this year’s Geothink Summer Institute will run from June 15-16, 2015 and will be held at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. Check in at our Summer Institute web site, where we’ll be live tweeting the day’s events.

The agenda is jam-packed with big names in the emergent field of crowdsourcing, which one Geothinker calls “a web-based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals.” That’s from the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalistm and Communication Assistant Professor Daren Brabham, who will be giving one of the morning’s first sessions to more than 30 undergraduate and graduate students who have registered to attend.

Other speakers include Robert Goodspeed, assistant professor of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Monica Stephens, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at State University of New York at Buffalo and Geothink Head Renee Sieber, McGill University associate professor in the Department of Geography and School of Environment. Check out the full agenda here.

Speakers will explore topics related to crowdsourcing in a hyperlocal world where geospatial technologies like Google Maps and GPS-enabled cellphones enable massive quantities of data to be collected. In today’s world, there are tweets about potholes, mobile applications which deliver directions to the nearest coffee shop, and large databases only recently opened by many governments around the world.

The summer institute is hosted by Geothink, a five-year partnership grant awarded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in 2012. The partnership includes researchers in different institutions across Canada, as well as partners in Canadian municipal governments, non-profits and the private sector. The expertise of our group is wide-ranging and includes aspects of social sciences as well as humanities such as: geography, GIS/geospatial analysis, urban planning, communications, and law.

If you have thoughts or questions about the article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Making Waves

Making Waves: Developing, Testing and Deploying a Smart Phone App to Share Examples of Good and Poor Water Conservation in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia by Prof. Jon Corbett

Here at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, we have just hired two students, Andrew Barton and Emily Millard, to work on the Geothink project. They are being co-financed by Geothink and the British Columbia Work Study program. Together with our SSHRC partner, the Okanagan Basin Water Board, and a new partner, the Okanagan Science Centre, we have co-developed a proposal that we have submitted to the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia entitled “Making Waves: Developing, testing and deploying a smart phone app to share examples of good and poor water conservation in the Okanagan Valley.” We are proposing to work directly with youth (age 10 -13) in the North and Central Okanagan to co-design and develop a mobile application that will allow members of the public to share photographs and short commentaries of good and poor water conservation. The app will work in conjunction with existing web-based mapping software (http://geolive.ca) that we developed for a prior grant; it also will include discussion tools. The resulting information, displayed on a website, will make this volunteered information accessible to the general public as a means to make them more aware of water conservation in the valley and provide them with a direct medium through which to engage with this issue.

The Okanagan has among the highest per capita water demands and lowest per capita water supplies in Canada. The environment is semi-arid, and the southern portions of the watershed include Canada’s only designated desert.  Research conducted by Dr. Stewart Cohen and other scientists at UBC and partner institutions have projected serious impacts of climate change on the Okanagan water supply. Yet, the sense among the general public and visitors is that the valley is rich with water. One of the greatest challenges faced by the Okanagan Basin Water Board (OBWB) is to make people more aware of the increasing need to conserve water. As a result OBWB has developed the Okanagan Waterwise program that has the clear mandate to bring residents of the Okanagan valley together with the understanding that the valley’s water source is connected — and that all residents share the same resource. Hopefully it would increase awareness among valley residents about water issues in the Okanagan, support Okanagan residents in making positive changes in their own water habits that will protect the quality and quantity of the valley’s water, and share ideas about how all the valley’s residents can do something to preserve the unique character of the region.

Our proposed project will bring together three leading organization in the region to directly address these four established, and much needed, objectives. Our proposed project and the Water Conservation app will act as a medium to bring together members from throughout the valley to share their views and perspectives on current water use, to increase awareness of all users of both their own and others use of water; for example users might contribute photographs and their perspectives on xeriscape gardening or low water use public facilities. Through raising this awareness our hope is to support change toward more efficient water use in order to create a more sustainable water management practice in the future.

We welcome your participation in this and other projects, especially since we hope that this project can be generalized to other activities. If you’d like more information or a status report, please email Emily Millard (emilyloumillard@gmail.com), Andrew Barton (andrew@redshift.bc.ca) or their supervisor, Jon Corbett (jon.corbett@ubc.ca)