Tag Archives: Pamela Robinson

Spotlight on Recent Publications: Critical Reflections on Outcomes from Three Geoweb Partnerships

By Naomi Bloch

Exploring university–community partnerships

Participatory geospatial technologies have the potential to support and promote citizen engagement. This great promise has led to more collaborations between academics and community partners interested in pursuing this aim. In their recently published paper, “A web of expectations: Evolving relationships in community participatory geoweb projects,” four Geothink researchers and their colleagues cast a reflective eye on the participatory action research processes behind three completed geoweb partnership projects.

Co-author Jon Corbett, an associate professor in Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, sees their ACME journal article as helping to fill a gap in the geoweb literature. “For me, one of the things I’m most interested in is how—in a truthful and well-positioned way—we can talk about the veracity of the work that we’ve done in regards to its ability to actually bring about impact and social change,” Corbett said.
In the article, the authors compare the different cases in order to consider some of the tangible, empirical challenges that the projects encountered, concentrating on the frictions that can occur where technical and social considerations intersect.

Central Okanagan Community Food Map interface

Participatory geoweb initiatives commonly rely on out-of-the-box mapping tools. For these three projects, a central aim was to employ the expertise of the university researchers to co-develop and co-evaluate custom geospatial web tools that could address community partners’ objectives. Ideally, such collaborations can benefit all parties. Researchers can learn about the potential and the limitations of the geoweb as a tool for civic engagement while partners have the opportunity to reflect on their objectives and access a wider tool set for accomplishing them. In reality, collaborations require compromises and negotiations. The question then becomes: when are researchers’ academic objectives and partners’ community objectives truly complementary?

In the first case study, the geoweb was used to create a participatory business promotion website for a rural Quebec community, intended as one component of a larger regional economic development strategy. The second case was a collaboration between two university partners and a cultural heritage organization in Ontario. The partners hoped the customized online tool could “serve as a ‘living’ repository of cultural heritage information that was both accessible to the public and could facilitate the contribution of knowledge from the public.” In the third project, university researchers worked with government and grassroots organizations at local as well as provincial levels. The vision in this case was to enable non-expert community members in the Okanagan region to share their own knowledge and experiences about local food and its availability.

Corbett explained that in reflecting on their work, the researchers realized that as social scientists with very specific domains of expertise in political science, geographic information systems, and community research, “the types of skills we needed to negotiate the relationships were far different from the sorts of traditional disciplinary fields that we work in.” Their collaborators tended to identify the academics more as technical consultants than scholars. As the authors write, “most academics remain untrained in software development, design, marketing, long-term application management and updating, legal related issues, [and] terms of service.”

Although the three collaborations were quite different in terms of the publics involved as well as the negotiated objectives of the projects and the tools employed to achieve them, the authors identified several key common themes. The authors note, “In all three case studies, we found that the process of technology development had substantial influence on the relationship between university developers and community organization partners. This influence was seen in the initial expectations of community partners, differential in power between researcher and community, sustainability of tools and collaborations, and the change from research collaboration towards ‘deal making.'”

In the end, Corbett said, “All of the projects were extremely precarious in how we could assign value or success to them. The paper was really an academic reflection on the outcomes of those three different projects.”

Abstract

New forms of participatory online geospatial technology have the potential to support citizen engagement in governance and community development. The mechanisms of this contribution have predominantly been cast in the literature as ‘citizens as sensors’, with individuals acting as a distributed network, feeding academics or government with data. To counter this dominant perspective, we describe our shared experiences with the development of three community-based Geospatial Web 2.0 (Geoweb) projects, where community organizations were engaged as partners, with the general aim to bring about social change in their communities through technology development and implementation. Developing Geoweb tools with community organizations was a process that saw significant evolution of project expectations and relationships. As Geoweb tool development encountered the realities of technological development and implementation in a community context, this served to reduce organizational enthusiasm and support for projects as a whole. We question the power dynamics at play between university researchers and organizations, including project financing, both during development and in the long term. How researchers managed, or perpetuated, many of the popular myths of the Geoweb, namely that it is inexpensive and easy to use (thought not to build, perhaps) impacted the success of each project and the sustainability of relationships between researcher and organization. Ultimately, this research shows the continuing gap between the promise of online geospatial technology, and the realities of its implementation at the community level.

Reference: Johnson, Peter A, Jon Corbett, Christopher Gore, Pamela J Robinson, Patrick Allen, and Renee E Sieber. A web of expectations: Evolving relationships in community participatory geoweb projects. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, 14(3), 827-848.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Naomi Bloch, Geothink’s digital journalist, at naomi.bloch2@gmail.com.

Part 2: Our Project Head on North American Civic Participation and Geothink’s Projects

By Drew Bush

Renee Sieber, associate professor in McGill University’s Department of Geography and School of Environment.

Part 2 (of 2). This is the second in a two part series with the head of Geothink.ca, Renee Sieber, an associate professor in the Department of Geography and School of Environment at McGill University. In this second part, we pick up the story of how Sieber sees civic participation in North America during an age of technological change. Catch Part 1 here if you missed our coverage of Geothink itself; its vision, goal and design.

Talking with Renee Sieber means finding exuberance and excitement for each of Geothink.ca’s projects and the work of all the team members, collaborators and partners. One place to start such a conversation is with how many cities make information available to the public.

“Cities are also publishing enormous amounts of data—it’s called open data,” Sieber, Geothink’s head and an associate professor at McGill University, said. “And this data can be turned into applications that for example can allow citizens to more easily know when they should put their recycling out and what types of recycling [exist], where there is going to be traffic congestion or traffic construction, when the next city council meeting will be held and what will be on the city council agenda.”

This open data forms the basis for how many modern technologies use programs to simplify and facilitate citizen interactions with city garbage services, transportation networks or city policies and processes. In particular, one Geothink project aims to interrogate how standards are created for open data—no easy thing, according to Sieber, when you’re talking not just about abstract data but even more abstract metadata.

“So why should one care about that?” Sieber asked. “Well, we should care about that first of all because the reason that people can now get up-to-date transit information in cities all over North America and, indeed, cities all over the world is because of a very small open data standard called GTFS, the General Transit Feed Specification.”

This prototype successful standard (or way of structuring public transportation data) resulted from a partnership between Google and Portland, Oregon. And, according to Sieber, it’s not about visualizing the data but standardizing its structure so that it can be used in equations that allow cities to show when the next bus will arrive, the best ways to get from point x to point y, and to put all this information on a map. In fact, Open511, a standard for traffic and road construction, explicitly styles itself after this prototype.

“It’s really interesting for us to figure out what new data standards will emerge,” added Sieber. “For example, will there be one to show traffic construction all over the country or all over North America?”

Yet it marks only one way Geothink is examining citizen interactions with cities. At Ryerson University, Associate Professor Pamela Robinson is working on examining civic hackathons where cities bring together techies and interested citizens to find innovative ways to design and build applications for city data and improve city services. The problem, according to Sieber, is that after the hackathons many such applications or proofs of concepts disappear. For example, some recent winners of a hackathon in the United Kingdom felt that too many applications end up up in the back alleys of BitBucket or GitHub.

“So it can be a quite frustrating experience,” Sieber said. “And cities and the participants alike look towards ways to try to retain that enthusiasm over time and to build on the proofs of concept to actually deploy the apps. So Pamela is conducting research on how to create that technological sustainability.”

In yet one other project, Geothink has partnered with the Nova Scotia Government’s Community Counts program located in Halifax, Nova Scotia to study the preferences of end-users from community-based management organizations or non-profits who utilize the open data from the province. Community Counts’s mission is to make it easier for such organizations to use information such as socio-demographic data, although the organization itself just lost funding in the province’s most recent budget.

“This is very different from working with apps from open data because with apps you generally know who the developers are but you don’t know who the end-users are,” Sieber said. “So we are conducting a project with them to ask questions of the end-users to find out what they find valuable or challenging in using data. And we’ll then infer that to the challenges and opportunities of working with open data that cities produce.”

So how does all this reflect on what civic participation means today in North America? Governments can now know if you visit certain parks, go to certain places for coffee, and meet certain friends while doing either. So, theoretically at least, they can now design urban spaces and cities themselves to be safer, more vibrant, and better suited to the range of activities taking place in these places.

“That seems both incredibly convenient and incredibly Orwellian at the same time,” Sieber said. To find out more about her views of civic participation, stay tuned for our next Geothoughts Podcast by signing up to receive it on iTunes.

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

Civic Hackathons: Innovation, Procurement, or Civic Engagement?

By Peter Johnson

I’ve recently published a jointly-authored viewpoint piece with Dr. Pamela Robinson from Ryerson University in Review of Policy Research. Titled ‘Civic Hackathons: Innovation, Procurement, or Civic Engagement?‘, we take a critical look at the recent phenomenon of civic hackathons – time limited contests typically run by governments designed to promote use of open data resources, and potentially solve local issues.

Both Pamela and myself have been struck by the high level of interest and hype that many civic hackathons have received, and decided to examine the multiple end points and implications generated from these events. For example, do civic hackathons have the potential to replace the traditional ways that government purchases products and services? Similarly, are these events considered to be new vectors for citizen engagement, and if so, who is actually participating in them, and for what purposes? This is a rich area for future questions, as this paper provides guidance towards a more fully developed research program that critically evaluates the hackathon process and outcomes.

Peter A. Johnson
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography and Environmental Management
University of Waterloo

Cross post from Geospatial Participation