Emerging Theme: Volunteered Geographic Information

For this week's Emerging Theme, you will review the materials below and engage in a Canvas discussion with your classmates - see details below. 

Spatial data has traditionally been developed by government agencies and businesses who could afford the technical and financial expenditure necessary to digitize spatial information. Recent advances in web mapping and GPS technology make it possible for tech-savvy volunteers to develop their own spatial datasets. This sort of geographic data is frequently called "Volunteered Geographic Information" or VGI for short. The following short (31 seconds) video below shows the dramatic VGI response to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake through additions and corrections to OpenStreetMap data for the country. Haiti had previously been a poorly-mapped place, and there was an immediate need in the aftermath of the disaster to develop a much better base-map to help recovery efforts. This was a watershed event in VGI for disaster/humanitarian response as discussed by Meier in the first chapter of Digital Humanitarians you read in Lesson 1. 

One of the most effective VGI efforts can be found at OpenStreetMap.org. OpenStreetMap has the goal of developing a basemap of roads, place names, and other common spatial features for the world, based entirely on volunteered contributions. The OpenStreetMap project aims to provide a completely free worldwide geospatial dataset without any legal or technical restrictions on its use. Most popular web mapping resources like Google Maps or Bing Maps tightly constrain how their data can be manipulated, published, or displayed. Quite a few folks take it for granted that these maps are free, but, in fact, they are only free because those companies are providing access to them right now for free. You are not allowed to re-use and re-purpose those resources or download their data yourself, and if Google decided tomorrow to charge you for access to their maps, you would have no recourse to ensure you kept access for free.

Another important trend in VGI is the use of microtasking or ‘micromapping’ campaigns that split up a big task into small chunks that the VGI community can take on. For example, have a look at the this interesting and useful review of microtasksings role in emergency management from the Australian Institute of Disaster Resilience. In some systems, you are presented with tiles from high-resolution imagery and you are asked to search for and tag features like ‘Trash heaps’, ‘Blocked roads’ and ‘Damaged buildings’. It is worth noting that microtasking like this can also be used to train Machine Learning algorithms to detect these same features with high accuracy. You can read more about this in Chapter 6, ‘Artificial Intelligence in the Sky’, of Digital Humanitarians. This is really cutting-edge stuff that is happening now.

Now, I’d like you to consider VGI with “citizens as sensors”. This is where information relevant to the disaster is collected through devices people are carrying around. I am sure you can think of lots of examples of data you could get from smartphones, but I wanted to highlight a project that started in Japan shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The Safecast team developed small devices for radiation, mapping the results which you can see on the web map here. A very recent example of citizens as sensors is the COVIDSafe App being used in Australia. This is a contract tracing app that records all of the people you come in contact with via Bluetooth on mobile phones. The data are encrypted on your phone and only accessed if someone you came in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.   

Finally, for a critical perspective, please look at the recent (2018) paper by Billy Tusker Haworth titled, “Implications of Volunteered Geographic Information for Disaster Management and GIScience: A More Complex World of Volunteered Geography".