Rahemtulla presentation at GEOIDE 2009 #1

admin — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:29:03 +0000

Governance And The Geoweb, Sieber, R., Hanif Rahemtulla, Turner, A. Public participation is increasingly recognized as essential not only to minimize the damage caused by climate change, but also to maximize the opportunities presented by a transition to a low carbon economy. Government agencies, at all scales, will need to engage the public in actual decision‐making on climate change adaptation strategies, yielding local observations on climate change effects and novel ideas for adaptation. However, the increasing complexities of emergent environmental issues (e.g., climate change) are more vexing to more traditional means of engaging the public (e.g., public meetings), while government staff confront the difficultly of summarizing, collating and integrating citizen input. eGovernment solutions such as authoritative Web mapping predominantly offer one‐way communication from government to the public and do not include effective means to collect citizen feedback nor engage citizens in two‐way dialogues. New mechanisms, like the Geospatial Web (or Geoweb), have the potential to address these challenges and present a unique opportunity for government.

GEOIDE PIV‐41 in collaboration with our international partners in Europe and the United States are examining the participatory governance potential of the Geoweb and, in particular, its potential to enable a two‐way dialogue between government and civil society. Initially, this means comparing and contrasting the participatory Geoweb and traditional P/PGIS (including web‐based P/PGIS), which is the main focus of this presentation. The terms Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) and Participatory GIS (PGIS) (collectively shortened to P/PGIS) were coined to situate and evaluate the role of geomatics in government decision‐making processes. Traditional geomatics has been promoted as a means to engage members of the civil society in policy making, although geomatics has been found to both empower and marginalize (usually simultaneously) those publics. One question is whether anything has changed with the advent of the Geoweb. The findings from this comparison will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how citizens might act as distributed sensors for local knowledge, providing data and information that could aid their governments in addressing and developing policy and legislation that responds to this change.

The Participatory Geoweb - steering wheel

Rahemtulla presentation at GEOIDE 2009 #1