PPGIS

AUTHORS: Bowser, A., and Shanley, L. STUDY DIRECTOR: Lea Shanley. Editor: Aaron Lovell. This report showcases seventeen case studies that offer a mosaic view of federally-sponsored citizen science and open innovation projects, from in-the-field data collection to online games for collective problem-solving. Projects in citizen science and open innovation are usually designed to advance science or create new technologies. But many projects have added impacts including supporting practices in education, management, and public policy.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer-based tools used to collect, store, manipulate and display spatially-referenced information. They are used to support decision-making in a wide variety of contexts, including spatial planning and environmental management. Because the process of GIS production, from software development to visualization of GIS output, is characterized by political, economic and social motivations, it is important that GIS practitioners are aware of issues such as access to data and the political economy of information, and the nature of GIS epistemologies vis-à-vis multiple coexisting perceptions of reality. Lack of such appreciation can lead to social and spatial marginalization of communities. Use of GIS in a research program for environmental management of the Cooum River in Chennai, and in support of participatory processes for managing environment and health in slums are used to demonstrate appropriate applications of GIS in India. Internet-distributed GIS as a potential avenue to address issues of public access to data is also considered.

A B S T R A C T Zoning is a ubiquitous land use planning and regulatory mechanism whose purpose is to provide for orderly community growth and development by segregating land uses that are deemed incompatible. The delineation of zones and related land use ordinances are traditional components of an expert-driven, local government process that produces a general or comprehensive land use plan as required by law. Public participation in the development of general land use plans has rarely used participatory mapping methods that engage the general public to explicitly inform zoning decisions. In this study, we demonstrate how participatory mapping methods can assess the consistency, compatibility, and potential conflict of zoning with public values and preferences in a general plan revision process using a coastal community in California as a case study. We describe the participatory mapping design, data collection, and data analyses in a workflow to illustrate the methods, and present the strengths and limitations of the approach for use in a general land use planning process. Future research should expand these methods to assess the potential effects of resident domicile and " NIMBYism " on the results, and importantly, assess the impact of public participatory mapping in land use decisions if actually implemented by local government authorities.

This article addresses the challenges to urban planning, which is a social activity that affects the development of urban communities and helps them to cope with the challenges posed by the global-local and real-virtual dialectic. The approach to planning is influenced by an emerging creativity and knowledge-sharing culture that has an inherent connection to global and digital transformations. Such a transformation is giving urban planning a new look, which is depicted in the concept of Urban Planning 2.0. In this article this paradigm shift is explained and illustrated with a special view to identifying the ways Web 2.0 tools can be utilised in urban planning. The fundamental question emerging in the critical evaluation of Urban Planning 2.0 is how citizen-oriented practices of Planning 2.0 relate to formal decision-making within the representative system of government and professionally and technocratically oriented planning practices of city governments. There is some evidence to suggest that the new Web 2.0 tools make the difference in open, inclusive and creative contexts, where their optimal deployment requires a paradigm shift in urban governance and planning.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the area of Participatory GIS (PGIS) has generated numerous interactive mapping tools to support complex planning processes. The need to involve non-expert users makes the usability of these tools a crucial aspect that contributes to their success or failure. While many approaches and procedures have been proposed to assess usability in general, to date there is no standardized way to measure the overall usability of a PGIS. For this purpose, we introduce the Participatory GIS Usability Scale (PGUS), a questionnaire to evaluate the usability of a PGIS along five dimensions (user interface, spatial interface, learnability, effectiveness, and communication). The questionnaire was developed in collaboration with the user community of SeaSketch, a web-based platform for marine spatial planning. PGUS quantifies the subjective perception of usability on a scale between 0 and 100, facilitating the rapid evaluation and comparison between PGIS. As a case study, the PGUS was used to collect feedback from 175 SeaSketch users, highlighting the usability strengths and weaknesses of the platform.

Assuming the huge progress achieved in public participatory geographic information system (PPGIS) techniques and its current research gaps, this study aims to explore differences in the perception of spatial distribution of ecosystem services supply and demand between different stakeholders through collaborative mapping. The stakeholders selected included high influence stakeholder (with a high degree of interest on the ecosystem services׳ state and with an important influence into the environmental decision making process) and low influence stakeholders (with a high degree of interest on the ecosystem services׳ state and with a low influence in environmental management). Workshops took place in June 2013 in two regions of Andalusia; overall 29 participants were involved. Water provision, food from agriculture, livestock, erosion control, climate regulation, water purification, nature tourism, recreational hunting and tranquility were collaboratively mapped. Agriculture land-use and the protected area surface were also assessed in order to find patterns in ecosystem services supply, meanwhile the role of urban areas was assessed for ecosystem services demand. The results show that low and high influence stakeholders have different perceptions of the spatial distribution of ecosystem services and the scale of their demand. We call for the recognition of these knowledge differences (experiential and technical) and their inclusion in decision making processes regarding landscape planning.

Since 1996, participatory GIS (PGIS) has facilitated avenues through which public participation can occur. One of the ways practitioners articulate social change associated with PGIS interventions has been to qualify success using the term ‘empowerment’. This paper explores the extent to which PGIS academic literature has utilised, defined, measured, and analysed empowerment. This research will demonstrate the degree to which PGIS has, from 1996 to 2014, appropriately and adequately taken into account the causative and direct relationship between a PGIS intervention and empowerment. This article identifies works broadly dealing with PGIS, then searches within that subset of literature for the term ‘empowerment.’ The findings are both quantitatively and qualitatively assessed to explore the trends within the PGIS literature over time and to contextualise the ways in which empowerment has been identified, understood, and articulated. We conclude with a discussion on the extent to which future PGIS research and practice has the ability to disrupt power inequalities.

Participatory mapping has emerged as a powerful tool for the collection and use of geospatially oriented traditional and local ecological knowledge (LEK) across a variety of disciplines. The growth of this initiative in small island developing states (SIDS) has been widely applied to strengthen public awareness and capacity, particularly for environmental conservation, cultural preservation, and climate change adaptation. Participatory mapping strives to build community resilience and has proven to be a valuable technique in taking positive steps towards sustainable development especially in vulnerable communities. This paper examines participatory mapping and community engagement, the value of this practise in Caribbean SIDS facing the impacts of global climate change, and the lessons learnt from a variety of case studies that have been conducted in the wider Caribbean.

AUTHOR: John Crowley, Harvard HHI.  STUDY DIRECTOR: Lea Shanley. Editors: Aaron Lovell and Zach Bastian. Leaders in disaster response are finding it necessary to adapt to a new reality. Although community actions have always been the core of the recovery process, collective action from the grassroots has changed response operations in ways that few would have predicted. Using new tools that interconnect over expanding mobile networks, citizens can exchange information via maps and social media, then mobilize thousands of people to collect, analyze, and act on that information. Sometimes, community-sourced intelligence may be fresher and more accurate than the information given to the responders who provide aid. This report explores approaches to the questions that commonly emerge when building an interface between the grassroots and government agencies, with a particular focus on the accompanying legal, policy, and technology challenges.

"El MP3D es un método de mapeo participativo que integra conocimiento territorial indígena con datos sobre la elevación de la tierra y la profundidad del mar, para producir modelos de relieve autónomos, a escala y georreferenciados. Basadas esencialmente en el conocimiento territorial local, el uso y la cobertura de la tierra y otras características son representados por los informantes en el modelo, utilizando chinchetas para los puntos, hilos para las líneas y pinturas para los polígonos. Al completarse, se aplica un cuadriculado a escala y georreferenciado para facilitar la extracción o la importación de datos. Los datos representados en la maqueta son extraídos, digitalizados y trazados. Al completarse el ejercicio, el modelo permanece en la comunidad.
El modelado participativo tridimensional (MP3D) ha sido concebido como un método para acercar el potencial de SIG a las comunidades rurales y para superar la brecha que existe entre las tecnologías de la información geográfica y las capacidades encontradas entre comunidades marginadas y aisladas que frecuentemente dependen de recursos naturales.
Este manual apunta a asistir a activistas, investigadores y profesionales del aprendizaje y acción participativos (PLA) y SIG en llevar el poder de los SIG a nivel popular mediante el uso de MP3D. Proporciona las manos-sobre las orientaciones sobre cómo organizar y poner en práctica un ejercicio MP3D. Además, incluye puntos de vista sobre el aprendizaje y la cognición espacial, sobre la historia de las maquetas y sobre la utilización del método en todo el mundo.
El 5 de noviembre de 2007, P3DM fue galardonada con el Premio de la Cumbre Mundial de 2007 en la categoría de e-cultura. P3DM fue considerado como uno de los 40 ejemplos de mejores prácticas de calidad de los contenidos digitales en el mundo."

The marine environment provides significant benefits to many local communities. Pressure to develop coastal waterways worldwide creates an urgent need for tools to locate marine spaces that have important social or ecological values, and to quantify their relative importance. The primary objective of this study was to develop, apply and critically assess a tool to identify important social-ecological hotspots in the marine environment. The study was conducted in a typical coastal community in northern British Columbia, Canada. This expert-informed GIS, or xGIS, tool used a survey instrument to draw on the knowledge of local experts from a range of backgrounds with respect to a series of 12 social-ecological value attributes, such as biodiversity, cultural and economic values. We identified approximately 1500 polygons on marine maps and assigned relative values to them using a token distribution exercise. A series of spatial statistical analyses were performed to locate and quantify ...

Citizen participation should be an essential part of an urban planning process if the needs of the local population are to be addressed. Citizen participation should also improve acceptance of private construction projects by residents that live in or near such development. A complementary form of citizen participation to public planning meetings is to permit citizen engagement via Web 2.0 technologies, which also has the potential to get citizens involved that are usually difficult to reach. We aim to build a social, i.e. participatory, planning platform that allows technology savvy citizens to inform themselves of future and ongoing development projects and to also discuss them online. In this work we discuss the functional needs and context-of-use constraints of such an e-planning platform. A conceptual model of the technical architecture is outlined and a prototype implementation is presented. This prototype is built on free and open source software components, including a social network, to enable platform adoption in other locations. Finally, we discuss the research needs that are to be addressed if the development of participatory e-planning platforms should advance.

PPGIS is often presented and promoted as a more people-centered GIS compared to a traditional technocratic, expert-
driven tool or methodology. Yet, the umbrella of PPGIS is quite broad. Within such a wide context, it may be helpful for
practitioners and scholars of PPGIS to better understand exactly what PPGIS is. Or, in other words, having a clearer conception
of what “public” and “participation” are, and how they relate to expected outcomes and outputs within a GIS context, is
very important as the ideas and ideals of PPGIS continue to gain momentum. Understanding the variations in the types of
“public,” cross-referencing them against the distinctions in “participation” and linking the intersection of types of “public” and
“participation” to expected GIS outcomes and outputs would greatly enrich the fi eld. Moreover, such delineation would allow
PPGIS practitioners and those considering PPGIS approaches to appreciate the linkages of certain types of participation processes,
specifi c elements of the public, and particular types of expected project results. This paper offers a review of key literature relevant
to public participation and presents potential integrated matrices to guide future PPGIS thought.

In recent years there have been huge advancements in GIS as a technology and as a science. Previously, GIS was critiqued as a segregating science used exclusively by geospatial experts. In recent years however, various studies have investigated the potential for communities without geospatial training to contribute towards, or benefit from, the use of GIS. Indeed, innovations such as open source and internet based packages like Google Earth and Open Street Map as well as mobile navigation devices have already popularised the importance of geospatial data. This study sought to investigate one way of providing up-to-date maps to fishermen and tourists using dams in South Africa. The paper reports on a pilot case study in the use of web based GIS service for mapping on the Theewaterskloof dam in South Africa. It presents a case study methodology for the development and testing of a web GIS that can be optimised for smartphones and tablets so that communities can access updated information while using the dam, which is rated as dangerous, for fishing or other recreational activity

A B S T R A C T Coral reefs provide important ecological services such as biodiversity, climate regulation, and cultural benefits through recreation and tourism. However, many of the world's reefs are declining, with Caribbean reefs suffering a significant decline in living corals over the past half century. This situation emphasizes the need to assess and monitor reef conditions using a variety of methods. In this study, a new method for assessing reef conditions to inform management using participatory mapping by coral reef " experts " in the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) is described. Occupational SCUBA divers were recruited (n=87) to map coral reef conditions, uses, and threats (stressors) using an internet-based mapping website. The data reveal an uneven geographic distribution of reef conditions in the USVI with the most frequently mapped perceived healthy reef characteristics being: large amount of physical reef structure (n=872 markers); endangered or threatened species present (n=721); and large amount of live coral cover (n=615). The greatest perceived threats were: invasive species (n=606); water pollution (n=234); and unsustainable fishing (n=200). Areas of important reef characteristics, perceived threats to reefs, and perceived recovery potential were plotted to identify areas requiring critical management attention. The authors found that perceptions of healthy reef conditions outnumbered perceptions of reef threats for nine of the ten most familiar coral reefs; the most frequent activity type within the coral reefs was tourism diving; and for the most familiar coral reefs, the divers perceived a high recovery potential. Given the novelty of participatory mapping methods to assess coral reefs, the strengths and weaknesses of the method is evaluated. The authors further propose a management typology for categorizing reef areas to inform their future management. In the absence of primary data, or, as a supplement to underwater surveys and remotely-sensed data on reef condition, participatory mapping can provide a cost-effective means for assessing coral reef conditions while identifying place-specific reef locations requiring management attention.

Pengembangan Program Studi Ilmu Pendidikan Guru pada jenjang magister (S2), merupakan salah satu upaya strategis Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (UPI) guna memperkokoh common ground sebagai Perguruan Tinggi yang bervisi Pelopor dan Unggul (Leading and Outstanding) dalam pengembangan disiplin ilmu pendidikan dan pendidikan disiplin ilmu, dan disiplin ilmu lain yang menunjangnya.

Common people have proven that high-tech ICT tools can be used for their common social and political benefit. From Tunisia to Wall-Street, social communication networks have played a decisive role in the creation, mobilization, and organization of public protest. But have they helped public reform? Web 2.0 PGIS tools are now one frontier away from becoming a societal tool in building a modern grass-root effective monitoring role. This paper is about how the new emerging concepts for people Web-based monitoring and its georeferenced attributes and analyses can help societies in transition achieve genuine change and reform. These tools can monitor government actions, but can they also track and assist communities combat their internal ills and own violations? It’s the story of an emerging world in which everyone is a partner in societal reform. A world in which young, creative and resourceful youth are leading the way in building a new society that is no-longer bipolar (govern vs governed). The paper shows how a web2.0 geo-application is developed and used to inform and monitor agricultural land building violations in Egypt and in which the local authorities are helped by live citizen reporting, analysis and prediction using crowdmapping.

This paper situates the birth and death of anti-eviction protests correlative with San Francisco's Tech Boom as temporally mediated by the media itself. Specifically, I look at the media's conflation with anti-eviction and anti-technology, and its fictive narrations of anti-eviction protests as being anti-technology. Because of the thinness of this fiction and its impossibility of materializing, the media had to kill its own spectacle - a death which reverberated in the material realm. Drawing upon cultural and media analysis, along with critical race and feminist science and technology studies, I question ontological differences between representation and objects of representation. At the same time, I look to alternative media technology projects, such as the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, that have emerged to offer variant technological possibilities, as well as alternative temporal approaches to protest materiality. How do these projects shatter the dialectical narrative structure clung to by other media— the idea of technology either being good or bad, or of the anti-gentrification movement envisioned as dead or still breathing?

A modelagem tridimensional participativa (MP3D) é um método de mapeamento participativo que integra conhecimento geográfico nativo com dados sobre elevação do terreno e a profundidade do mar para produzir modelos 3D autônomos, em escala e georreferenciados. Essencialmente com base em memórias, o uso e a cobertura da terram, além de outras características, são descritos no modelo por informantes usando alfinetes para pontos, fios para linhas e tintas para polígonos. Finalmente, uma grade em escala e georreferenciada é aplicada para facilitar a extração ou importação de dados. Os dados descritos no modelo são extraídos, digitalizados e plotados. Após a conclusão do exercício de mapeamento, o modelo permanece com a Comunidade.
A Modelagem Participativa (MP3D) foi concebida como um método para aproximar o potencial do SIG das comunidades rurais e para ultrapassar o fosso que existe entre as tecnologias de informação geográfica e as capacidades encontradas nas comunidades marginalizadas e isoladas, que frequentemente dependem dos recursos naturais.
Este manual se destina a ajudar os ativistas, pesquisadores e praticantes da Aprendizagem e Ação Participativa (AAP) e do SIG a conduzirem a força do SIG até o nível mais básico por meio do uso da MP3D. Ele fornece orientações práticas sobre como organizar e implementar um exercício de MP3D. Além disso, inclui percepções sobre a aprendizagem de adultos e da cognição geográfica, sobre a história dos modelos em relevo e sobre a utilização do método em todo o mundo.Em 5 de novembro de 2007, a Modelagem Tridimensional Participativa (MP3D) foi agraciada com o Premio de la Cumbre Mundial de 2007 (Prêmio Cúpula Mundial), na categoria de e-cultura. A MP3D foi considerada como sendo um dos 40 exemplos de boas práticas de qualidade e de conteúdo no mundo.

Analysis of emotions has received recognition in urban studies as a mean to understand subjective quality of life. Availability of spontaneous user generated online urban data generated by users in location based social networks broadens possibilities for such analysis as described in a number of studies. However the LBSN data is not shared deliberately by users and is not meant to be an expression of emotions, which makes its representativeness and validity questionable. Another source of data - public participation geo-information systems - helps to overcome these limitations however may have its own, such as a small and biased sample. In this paper the results of the comparative analysis of the distribution of emotions in St. Petersburg, Russia, visualized with LBSN and PPGIS data, are presented. The dataset is formed from user-generated comments on urban venues from Google Places and data from PPGIS platform Imprecity (www.imprecity.ru), where citizens deliberately share their emotions and comments about public spaces. The data samples contain 1800 emotional marks from Imprecity and 2450 geolocated comments from Google Places marked by experts and then processed with Naïve Bayes Classifier. Comparison of positive and negative emotional maps created for Imprecity and Google Places shows shared tendencies in emotional distribution, such as concentration of emotions in the city centre and collocation of positive and negative emotions. There are also differences in emotional distribution: PPGIS data shows local “emotional” islands, which correspond to pedestrian areas and green spaces. The comparative analysis appears to be insightful and capable of revealing recurring spatial tendencies in subjective perception of the city.

It is assumed that the primary objective of using PPGIS is to stimulate more public or community involvement with decision-making. The application of these tools in the US has focused on high-tech applications to engage the masses in the process. However, in the context of developing countries, and precisely when dealing with the problems of the urban poor, will the rise of new technological fixes help solve traditional participation problems? This paper reviews the advent and application of these new technologies in the US and in Egypt, how they may be used to solve some issues relating to traditional public participation and whether a high-tech or a low-tech approach should be emphasized. It concludes with a comparison between the theory and application of public participation in both the US and Egypt. 

منطلقات  البنى التحتية لنظم المعلومات الجغرافية المجتمعية في البلدان النامية

 قضية البحث: يناقش هذا البحث ملائمة الفرضية الشائعة في العالم الغربي بأن التوسع في استخدام تقنيات نظم المعلومات الجغرافية المجتمعية (PPGIS) من شأنه تشجيع المزيد من مشاركة المجتمع المحلي في عملية صنع القرار المكاني. ومع ذلك ، وفي سياق البلدان النامية ، وبالذات عند التعامل مع مشكلات المناطق الحضرية ، هل من الواقعي افتراض بأن الحلول التكنولوجية الجديدة فقط هي مفتاح الحل ؟ وما هي حدود فعاليات هذه الأداة، وكيف يمكن أن نؤسس لنهج ملائم  تقنيا وفكريا لحل بعض القضايا التقليدية المتعلقة بالمشاركة؟

الهدف: تحديد وتصنيف بعض من المنطلقات الخاصة بمبادرات نظم المعلومات الجغرافية المجتمعية  PPGIS لبناء البنية التحتية لتطبيق التقنيات الحديثة على نحو أفضل، وذلك في ضوء نموذج تقييم مبني على ثلاثة محاور للوصول إلى ملخص للفرص والقيود المرتبطة بنظم المعلومات الجغرافية المجتمعية  PPGIS.

أهميته: انصب كثير من الاهتمام في مجال نظم المعلومات الجغرافية عندنا على التتبع غير الناقد للتقدم التقني للأنظمة في الغرب. حيث اعتمدت أكثر التطبيقات على الجوانب التحليلية والحسابية وتحسين النظام. بينما أغفلنا إلى حد ما قدراته في توسيع نطاق الدعم المجتمعي لاتخاذ القرار الاجتماعي. ومع بزوغ الاهتمام منذ أوائل القرن الحادي والعشرين على كيفية إدراج مشاركة الجمهور في إنتاج واستخدام نظم المعلومات الجغرافية، أصبح من الضروري متابعة هذا التطور الإيجابي ودراسة انعكاساته للعالم النامي، لأن حتى ذلك الاهتمام نشأ من مفهوم نظري غربي لمفهوم المشاركة الذي قد لا يتناسب مع أوضاعنا.

المنهجية: تحليل للعوامل التاريخية والتقنية التي تؤدي إلى دمج عنصري التخطيط القائم على المشاركة الإلكترونية ، وهما المشاركة المجتمعية ونهج تكنولوجيا المعلومات والاتصالات (ICT). ثم مقابلة المعوقات التي واجهت أدوات المشاركة المجتمعية لأكثر من نصف قرن مع الفرص التي تتيحها التقنيات الجديدة. ونظرا إلى أن مشاركة المجتمع المحلي على حد سواء من الناحية النظرية ومن حيث التقدم التقني هما وليدتا للفكر الغربي ، فلابد من النظر في الافتراضات والدوافع في حالتها الأصلية ومكان التطبيق. لهذا السبب ، فإن المنهجية تستعرض دراسات الحالة وتطبيق في كل الدول الغربية ومصر.

A B S T R A C T Traditional urban park research has used self-reported surveys and activity logs to examine relationships between health benefits, park use, and park features. An alternative approach uses participating mapping methods. This study sought to validate and expand on previous participatory mapping research methods and findings and address spatial scaling by applying these methods to a large urban park system. Key challenges for spatial scaling included ambiguity in park classification and achieving representative sampling for larger and spatially-dis-bursed urban residents. We designed an internet-based public participation GIS (PPGIS) survey and used household and volunteer sampling to identify the type and locations of urban park benefits. Study participants (n = 816) identified locations of physical activities and other urban park benefits (psychological, social, and environmental) which were analyzed by park type. Consistent with previous suburb-scale research, we found significant associations between urban park type and different urban park benefits. Linear parks were significantly associated with higher intensity physical activities; natural parks were associated with environmental benefits; and community parks were associated with benefits from social interaction. Neighborhood parks emerged as significantly associated with psychological benefits. The diversity of park activities and benefits were positively correlated with park size. Distance analysis confirmed that physical benefits of parks were closest to participant domicile, while social and environmental benefits were more distant. These results validate previous suburb-scale findings despite greater variability in park types and sample populations. Future urban park research using participatory mapping would benefit from greater effort to obtain participation from under-represented populations that can induce nonresponse bias, and analyses to determine whether system-wide results can be disaggregated by suburb or neighborhood to address social inequities in urban park benefits.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer-based tools used to collect, store, manipulate and display spatially-referenced information. They are used to support decision-making in a wide variety of contexts, including spatial planning and environmental management. Because the process of GIS production, from software development to visualization of GIS output, is characterized by political, economic and social motivations, it is important that GIS practitioners are aware of issues such as access to data and the political economy of information, and the nature of GIS epistemologies vis-a-vis multiple coexisting perceptions of reality. Lack of such appreciation can lead to social and spatial marginalization of communities. Use of GIS in a research program for environmental management of the Cooum River in Chennai, and in support of participatory processes for managing environment and health in slums are used to demonstrate appropriate applications of GIS in India. Internet-distr...