[OKFN-EN] Today at UCL "Civic Participation in an era of geospatial web and open data"

[Jenny Molloy]

Hi All

If you're London based, you may be interested in this talk on civic
participation in an era of geospatial web and open data.
Please circulate to anyone who might be interested.

Jenny



> *Subject:* "Civic Participation in an era of geospatial web and open
> data" - talk by Professor Renee Sieber, 5pm 4th August Room 102 Chadwick
> Building
>
>
>
> Dear all
>
>
>
> ** Apologies for cross-postings    - please circulate widely **
>
>
>
> Professor Renee Sieber, from McGill University in Canada, will be giving a
> guest lecture here at UCL at 5pm on the 4th August in Room 102,  Chadwick
> Building, as follows:
>
>
>
> *Title:*  Civic Participation in an era of geospatial web and open data
>
>
>
> *Abstract:* If we believe the rhetoric, information and communications
> technologies have transformed civic participation around issues of place. I
> refer here to public participation, usually by residents of a community, to
> influence public policy around issues that matter to everyday lived
> experience. Civic participation appears to have been impacted by new
> mapping platforms (e.g., Google Maps), which allow people to interactively
> and continuously navigate digital representations at increasingly
> hyperlocal resolutions. Location based services bring geospatial specific
> content to your mobile device where you are right now. To these digital
> maps experts and non-experts alike can add geotagged content of practically
> anything place-based, whether a restaurant review or a favourite park, a
> notice of a protest march or a siting of a pothole. The metaphors of civic
> participation extend into what is called the geospatial web. The
> location-based application FourSquare even enables you to get elected as
> mayor of a particular place. Much of geospatial web converges with big
> data. Interested publics have digitized the world’s road network and much
> more in the massive crowdsourced application, OpenStreetMap. To the
> petabytes of citizen-contributed, cloud-based geolocated data on the web,
> governments, such as cities, are opening up data sets as well as accepting
> data from the public, for example via Open 311 type systems.  Community
> residents can monitor or appify the cities in which they live.  The new
> hardware, software platforms, the apps, and the content appear to transform
> the way that government can talk to citizens, citizens can talk to
> government and citizens can talk to each other. Do the geospatial web and
> open data help or hurt civic participation? Or both? Is there any impact of
> the medium on civic participation or is the technology merely an instrument
> in a traditional, albeit messy, democratic process? This talk traces the
> past twenty years of research on civic participation using geospatial
> technologies and data. I’ll talk about what we know about civic
> participation on these platforms, in terms of motivations and hierarchies.
> I’ll describe how civic participation on this new medium can distance
> participation from channels of influence, blur experts and non-experts, and
> disrupt existing legal and political regimes. The new technologies have
> demanded changes in methods to assess effect and effectiveness. Indeed,
> they have challenged what constitues effectiveness on these new platforms.
> I’ll conclude with some scenarios of future where civic participation
> collides with the smart city.
>
>
>
> *Renée Sieber* is a professor of geography and environment (jointly
> appointed) at McGill University, in Montréal, Canada. She is also
> affiliated with McGill’s School of Computer Science, McGill’s Digital
> Humanities Working Group and the Global Environmental and Climate Change
> Centre of Quebec. Sieber works at the intersection of social theory and
> computer code. She is best known for her research on Public Participation
> GIS/ Participatory GIS. She authored the definitive literature review of
> PPGIS, which has been cited over 400 times. Because research also advances
> due to cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration, she created and
> then chaired the first three International PPGIS Conferences.  In addition
> to PPGIS, she’s written on spatial cyberinfrastructures (applied to the
> digital humanities but also to geostatistics) and geospatial ontologies
> (particularly applied to indigenous peoples). She’s currently researching
> the Geoweb and Open Data. In March 2013 she was awarded a $7millionCAD
> grant to investigate how citizens and cities interact via the geospatial
> web 2.0 and open data. The grant has 26 researchers, including several
> GIScience luminaries, and 30 partners across public and private sectors,
> and civil society. Within her own country, Sieber has profoundly shaped the
> GIScience research agenda. She created the GIS study group for the Canadian
> Association of Geographers in 2001. She co-created and currently sits on
> the executive committee of Spatial Knowledge and Information Canada, the
> association of GIS/RS/GIScience/spatial model using researchers. The
> conference is now in its fourth year.
>
>
>
> Renee is also recruiting a number of post-doctoral researchers  .. if you
> are interested in open data (valuing, app development, data flows),
> hackathons, open data standards, and citizen science around issues of open
> data or municipal crowdsourcing then come and meet her on the 4th August.
>
>
>
> Best regards
>
>
>
> Claire
>
>
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>
>
>
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>
>
> Dr Claire Ellul
>
> Lecturer in Geographical Information Science
>
> Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering
>
> University College London
>
> Gower Street
>
> London WC1E 6BT UK
>
>
>
> Tel: +44 (0) 20 7679 4118
>
>
>
> Why not sign up for our next events:
>
> GIS Careers Day:  http://gis-careers.eventbrite.co.uk
>
> 3D GIS Workshop @ GISRUK:  http://tinyurl.com/gisruk-3d
>
>
>
>
>
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