1. Towards a two-way participatory process
António José Silva Jorge Gustavo Rocha
ISEGI Departamento de Informática
Universidade Nova de Lisboa Universidade do Minho
Portugal Portugal

2. PhD research question
– How social networks and geospatial
crowdsourcing contribute and influence the design
of a two-way PPGIS platform?
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

3. How to design a two-way PPGIS?
● Instead of a pure theoretical study, we were challenged by the
National Administrative Agency (AMA) to design and create a
completely new platform
● Benefits for the public administration
– Government can use it to extend its own platforms
– Promote and improve the public participation process, either in number
or in quality, thus contributing to better decision-making process, with
clear benefits for all
– Promote the use of crowdsourcing geospatial data in government
● Great opportunity for our research
– Also interesting for other researchers, to extend our investigation to
other research fields
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

4. Design principles
● Diminishing the hierarchy and improving
relations
● Bidirectionally
● Greater return for participation
● More emphasis on the geographic component
● Enable and increase participation through all
available channels
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

5. Diminishing the hierarchy and
improving relations
● All stakeholders participate as persons (people living there, local
authorities, companies providing services there)
● Local authority must participate under the name of actual employees; no
service name like “Safety Department” are allowed
● Any kind of relationship established between public servants and citizens
is desirable and healthy
● Since local authorities can not delete and change the rules, the platform
tends to auto-regulate
– Regulation would be needed to ensure that local authorities are answering in time
and not disregarding any problems raised by citizens.
– We need to raise the participation to achieve this auto-regulation
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

6. Bidirectionally
● Privileged channel of communication from the city
council and other authorities with the citizen
● Reward every citizen with customized and timely
information about what is happening in his
neighbourhood
● Tree pruning, public facilities maintenance, road
maintenance, etc., can all be announced in
advance
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

7. Greater return for participation
● More active users should be highlighted based
on merit
● The rules to archive merit are known by all
● Stack Exchange for example, is a fast-growing
social network of 84 question and answer sites
on diverse topics that uses different badges to
reward participation
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

8. More emphasis on the geographic
component
● Relations are automatically created from users location(s). Users
can define several locations they care about
● This relation reflects not only a shared location but also a common
knowledge about the surroundings
● These relations also help us to filter information. With many
reported problems every day in different places, only information
regarding user's relations are presented
– Users always knows about problems reported in their neighbourhood
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

9. Enable and increase participation
through all available channels
● Mobile devices are very adequate for citizens to report problems on
the outdoor
– Capturing images
– Geo-referencing data
– Adequate to receive (almost real time) updates
● Users are notified by the public authorities of changes in their neighbourhood
● Optionally, users can see notifications about their current location
● Another mobile application for public servants will be developed, to
enabled them easily navigate to the different sites where problems
were reported
● The TV set top box interface is being developed by a major cable
operator
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

10. Implementation
● Take advantage of existent social networks
– Facebook
– Twitter
– YouTube
– etc
● Develop our own social network
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

11. Take advantage of existent social
networks
● Use existent social networks has several
advantages
● Well know successful use cases
– Making Millions via Twitter: @DellOutlet Surpasses $2 M
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

12. Disadvantages of existent social
networks
● More difficult to extend the functionalities to provide a service
– Terms of service related with data collection / use provisions
– Promotion of our service within that social network
– Restricted functionalities for third party applications
– Enforced design guidelines in our own application
● The existent application competition is to high
– Users are subjected to several dialogues asking for their permission
– Applications requesting users to invite their friends
– Mass invitations have the opposite effect and discourage users from using
the applications in question
● Enhanced communication is limited
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

13. Develop our own social network
● Evaluate and select a social network platform
● Only open source platforms were considered
● An updated
social networking software comparative is
available in Wikipedia
● We choose to use Drupal 7
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

14. Drupal 7
● Many features available out of the box
– Blogs
– Forums
– Contact forms
– Collaborative content (pages, books, comments, etc)
● Extended functionalities can by provided by
additional modules
● Layout supported by themes
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

15. Drupal 7
● Modules used (among others)
– DISQUS
● Sophisticated comments platform
– Geofield
● Allows geographical data to be attached to an entity, such
as a node
– OpenLayers
● Provide OL library functionality within Drupal
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

16. Drupal 7
● Some necessary improvements
– Many new contextual views are developed, both for
citizens and for public servants
– Views for statistical data by several criteria, including
time
– The geographical component is now part of the
social network
– The theme must be aware of the context
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia

17. Outlook
● Greater expectations:
– The availability of the application as open source
– The availability of the application as an API, so companies can
use the back-end in their applications
– The availability of participation data to other researchers
● The platform is a great opportunity to evaluate these
design principles and how social networks and geospatial
crowdsourcing contribute and enhance PPGIS platforms
ICCSA 2012, Salvador da Bahia