Participatory Geoweb: A Research Agenda

[Can't find the orginal abstract. Will post it as soon as I find it.]

This paper frames a critical research agenda for the Participatory Geoweb, which can be defined as the involvement of advocacy nonprofits organizations, marginalized peoples and local communities—the civil society—in the geospatial technologies and information of Web 2.0. It builds on prior research in participatory GIS, which has demonstrated the importance of understanding the extent of participation and its association with empowerment.

The Geoweb forces us to ask new questions, for example, what constitutes participation in a virtual community such as Second Life and reiterate old questions, for example, how do we surmount the wikipedia, June 29, 2010: "the gap between people with effective access to digital and information technology, and those with very limited or no access at all. It includes the imbalance both in physical access to technology and the resources and skills needed to effectively participate as a digital citizen." For us, the digital divide includes access to a range of platforms, from Internet to mobile technologies. It includes the availability of data to make effective use of those technologies (e.g., a coarse resolution digital background on Google Maps may make it difficult to effectively use that technology).">digital divide to increase access to digital earths. This presentation will delineate a taxonomy for that research agenda. It includes the nature of participation on the Geoweb (ranging from inserting a pushpin and geotagging a photo to building a community mashup and constructing a site such as www.ilovemountains.org). It interrogates the empowerment gained from interaction with the Geoweb. It calls for a consideration of participants/users and user generated content. At minimum, it “maps out” the emergent applications of geographically represented information on Web 2.0, that merely begin at Internet enabled digital earths but extend to geo-referenced mashups on mobile devices. The Participatory Geoweb is contextualized within a libertarian and egalitarian online ideology of equal access and opportunity, a civic sphere in which it is perceived that anyone can create content (blurring data supplier and user) and that everyone’s an expert. So what is the role of the expert, heretofor a staple of PGIS applications? What about legitimacy (will digital earths be seen as legitimate) and trust? Access means digital divide but also in an age of the surveillance society and multi-tiered Internet 3.0.

Some questions that must be asked:
Participation has been cast as involvement in policy making.
What is community? (Why does it matter how we define community? Can we separate users from place)? What do we do about virtual communities?
Digital Divide?
User generated content (usually the community generates the content. However, here there are tiers of users) It blurs, like PGIS did not do, the distinction between user and supplier.
Access to data (or access to scraping technology? Or presentation tools. What about data currency)?
Do we need to reconsider bottom up and top down?
Can we participate in a commercial sphere? Can we carve out a public sphere within a private sphere?
Getting heard above the noise? (geospamming and geoflaming)
What is the difference between participation and interaction of Web 2.0?

Examples:
Fixmystreet.com