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Dec

Citizens Need Skills For Real Time Information

Categories: Skills Development

Tags: PSFK, real time information, smart cities skills development, UN Global Pulse

A new trend analysis published by UK innovation consultants PSFK could equally serve as the manifesto for the Citizense website. Documenting 11 trends that describe the “Future of Real Time Information”, the report and associated slideshow touches on many of the key themes that Citizense aims to investigate in detail.

PSFK presents Future Of Real-Time Information from PSFK

Commissioned by the United Nations Global Pulse Team, the report posits that the new wave of real time technologies will enable local communities to “create new solutions that support the care and well-being of the world’s population”.

The authors – who are selling copies of the full report for $150 – suggest:

“We intend for it to be openly shared around the globe between communities, development agencies, academia and other organizations. The aim of the report is to highlight the opportunities that exist for organizations, large or small. In particular, the “left field” examples of data capture and use are published in hope of showcasing how organizations can leap-frog IT investment and still significantly improve the monitoring capabilities.”

The fascinating slideshow embedded here shows the power smart city technology and opendata access policies could have for citizens in cities around the world. Citizense will continue to document examples where communities are taking ownership of these new technologies, as well as providing the resources to enable skills development amongst those keen to participate more actively in the real time information world around them.

Dec

The Smart Citizen In A Disaster

Categories: Skills Development

Tags: citizen empowerment, citizen participation, Crisis communications, crisis mapping, emergency communications network, social media

Comments: No

Citizen-led crisis communications face Hurricane Sandy head-on

What information would you need to protect yourself during a natural disaster? How would you let others know of potential dangers caused by floods, fallen trees, or damaged buildings? Crisis communications responses to the recent Hurricane Sandy disaster provide an insight into how local residents of smart cities are sharing information as part of an emergency communications network.

What information do local neighborhoods need before, during and after a natural disaster? The UN’s Disaster Preparedness List of Indicators is fairly useless in helping define the nuts and bolts of what information can make a difference to people’s lives. That charter speaks more of the broad need for citizens to be trained in data systems and for there to be an information network in place, but shies away from mentioning what sort of information can help people build resilience in the face of disaster.

For New York, people needed to know:

What public transport is operating
What areas are evacuated and where to find a relative who lives in an evacuation zone
Where to eat during power blackouts
What roads and transport routes are too dangerous to use
What community services are open?
How best to get a business back up and running after the hurricane.

Hurricane Sandy hit New York from October 26, the week before the national elections. This meant that in addition to the usual crisis communications information, last minute polling booths needed to be established and residents informed of how they could still vote when the original voting sites were no longer operational.

The election timing may have been a boon to support for US Federal funding of infrastructure for a smart city emergency communications network. Industry site sensys reports a new cooperative policy culture emerged from the Federal level down to the local. Petty turf boundaries were superseded by a new recognition that a timely and effective assessment and disaster response could be cultivated from well-coordinated geospatial information coupled with crowd-sourced data such as social media and home-made video.

Emergency communications network tools and maps

The New York Times created a number of data visualizations and information management aids to support local residents stay informed. This included a map of all Hurricane Sandy-related deaths and regularly updated data on:

Subways and Buses

Power Failures

Tunnels, Trains and Airports

Wastewater

Flooding

Fires

Wind

The philanthropic-funded Crisis Mapping project managed by Google Emergency Response Team also produced a map with feeds from government bodies, the city’s open data platform and community-based social media conversations. A New York City map showed weather details and could be filtered to show any number of data sources including:

Latest alerts, NYC Emergency Mgmt
City of New York on Twitter
NYC Emergency Mgmt on Facebook
WNYC Transit Tracker
NYC.gov information
Damage Assessments and Power Info
Volunteer Opportunities
Sandy-related YouTube videos
Senior services
Shelters and recovery centers

NYC food distribution points
Red Cross shelters
NYC evacuation centers
FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers
Road Conditions
Emergency Alerts
Local emergency Twitter feeds
Public Alerts
Weather radar (precipitation)
Weather and observations[/bullets]

Following the crisis, a nearby city authority Fairfax County in Vermont published a metrics report showing how local citizens made use of emergency response data. For example, their blog jumped to 384,651 views with just over 600 comments during the storm, and 111 local residents shared hyperlocal information for a crowdsourced crisis map detailing power failures, road hazards, and location of volunteer resources. This map was viewed by over 12,000 residents during the days of the storm and the weeks following.

The next steps for citizen-participation in crisis communications

While there was a high level of community mobilization in sharing information during the hurricane, observers from the iDisaster website, which tracks the use of social media as an emergency management tool, made the following recommendations to support more active citizen engagement in future:

Organizations should plan how to redirect calls for assistance and information requests that may come through via social media channels. Trying to educate citizens about not using twitter to ask for emergency assistance needs to give way to creating a system in which citizens’ calls for helps could be directed from wherever they come from.
Community members should be trained up as Virtual Operations Support Team volunteers to assist with responding to the influx of social media requests at key local authority and emergency management services.
Communicators need to package information so that it can be accessed in bite-size chunks on mobile devices by local residents needing to be kept informed.
Emergency shelters and resource centers need to make it easy for people to recharge their mobile phones, as this was how local citizens accessed up to date information and shared warnings for others via social media.

What you can do in your city

Ask your local emergency management services to start up a volunteer social media support team program to enlist local citizens in helping with crisis communications during an emergency like Hurricane Sandy.
Start collecting different mobile phone recharger cables and donate them to your local Red Cross or other body responsible for providing recovery shelters during crises.
Train yourself or members of your local community group in how to make short videos showing a city problem like a road blockage or overflowing drain, so that citizens can help feed in hyperlocal crisis communications information.
Check out the Google Crisis Maps and Ushahadi community-created maps. Who should take responsibility for coordinating this element of an emergency communications network like this in your city?

Understand and improve crisis communications in your smart city

What citizen-accessible resources would you like to help you contribute to disaster management activities in your city? Head to our Facebook page and vote for which resource you would Citizense to create: volunteer training kits, a crisis mapping ebook guide, or a video tutorial on making disaster documented videos!

Oct

Air Quality Sensor Kick Starts In Barcelona

Categories: Skills Development

Tags: air quality egg, air quality sensor, air quality testing, Barcelona, cosm, Internet of Things, uABureau

Comments: 1

Air quality sensor meeting IoT Barcelona October 27

A new community-funded air quality sensor is about to be deployed around the world, giving local residents access to their own air quality testing system

Air Quality Egg is a new air quality sensor being released as part of a community-led project, organized by cosm. The Arduino-based air quality testing sensor will be distributed internationally in November 2012 to over 1,000 kickstarter funding partners.

On the weekend of 27-28 October, the Internet of Things Barcelona meetup presented the new Air Quality Egg sensor at their ‘In The Air’ event series. The series was co-hosted by cosm and the Barcelona-based ABureau. The meetup – modeled on similar successful communities operating in New York, London, Amsterdam and Madrid – will create projects aimed at showcasing how citizens and community members can design and implement urban living solutions using smart cities technology.

The Air Quality Egg sensor is being internationally deployed within the next month. It is hoped that the project will not only introduce a basic air quality testing infrastructure to local residents, but will serve to introduce more urbanists to the potential role sensors play in an urban environment. It will also give locals the opportunity to make use of the data that is collected. At the IoT Barcelona meetup, organizers were looking to group members to assist with identifying community-level projects that could raise awareness of this infrastructure and its benefits to urban life. In theory, the project could provide data so that:

Local neighborhood households are encouraged to car pool on days with higher readings

Community groups could use data to advocate for higher regulation of industry pollutants, for changes to road speed limits, for higher car ownership taxes, or for greater public transport and neighborhood walkability

City authorities could use the data to increase incentives for local residents to use bike rental schemes or public transport on high pollutant days

Data could be used by developers to create local apps that generate preferential running routes or bike travel routes through a city to avoid poor air quality neighborhoods.

Speaking at the meetup series, Ed Borden (Cosm Platform Evangelist) explained that Air Quality Egg is an international Kickstarter-funded initiative. The project has designed and built an air quality testing sensor that can now be deployed across an urban environment. Sensors will be hosted by individual citizens and relay realtime data to a shared cosm dashboard.

Left: The initial kickstarter project explains how the Air Quality Egg project will work.

The sensors will not be highly accurate at measuring air pollution such as exact levels of CO2 or particles per cubic meter. Due to the level of accuracy of sensors used and their cross-sensitivity to temperature and other factors, the goal of this initial project is to introduce communities and citizens to the potential of sensemaking. Relational trend data will be shared that expresses whether air quality is “worse” or “better” than yesterday or whether it is “worse” or “better than” another neighborhood block where air quality is also being measured.

Air Quality Egg chassis prototype

Cosm created the Air Quality Egg prototype using a 3D printer and is in the process of mass-producing the initial run of sensors, prior to their distribution in about 3 weeks time. The project takes a similar approach to community-led initiatives such as how radiation sensor data was shared after the Fukishima disaster, and the urban guerrilla-initiated Don’t Flush Me project in New York City, aimed at reducing sewage overspill into the Hudson River.

The Air Quality Egg has been built using Arduino sensors and a custom air quality sensor “shield” (hardware module) created by the project team.

Five Air Quality Eggs are slated to be distributed in the Poble Nou neighborhood of Barcelona by uABureau. They will be hosted by uABureau volunteer sensemakers.

Inside the Air Quality Egg (without the custom Arduino shield)

uABureau are also designing a data visualization to display readings in a novel interface. It uses images of the host sensemaker’s reactions to the air quality levels. Current air quality is shown by morphing the color and pixel size of the image. The data visualization would draw on readings from cosm’s sensor data dashboards and be maintained in realtime. By using local projections, or augmented reality, the results could be conveyed to other residents in the neighborhood. Some stumbling blocks still remain with using augmented reality to display data results in this way.

Community understanding of sensor technology and its’ potential use by local citizens is still limited. Projects like Air Quality Egg are being organized and implemented by technologists and Internet-of-Things enthusiasts and geeks who may not yet have networks with community groups or resident advocates. In many cities, the term “smart cities” is still fairly much rhetoric that is beyond the reach of local citizens. It is hoped that a project like Air Quality Egg will inspire local households to see the potential of hyperlocal realtime data and encourage greater use of sensor technologies for citizen engagement. This project is novel in creating an urban sensor infrastructure outside of the control of city authorities or large-scale private funding.

Would you install an air quality sensor at your home to help collect hyperlocal data on air quality levels? How would you use the data from an air quality project like this? What are your concerns about air quality in your neighborhood? Share your comments below or on our Facebook page.

May

BDigital Dedicated to the Digital Citizen at June Industry Conference

Categories: Skills Development

Tags: barcelona smart cities events, digital citizen

Comments: No

The entire day of June 5 will be devoted to urban mobility and the digital citizen at the forthcoming mid-year BDigital Apps industry event to be held at Caixa Forum Barcelona from June 4 – 6, 2012.

The full day agenda includes sessions on:

Citizen engagement in smart cities initiatives
How citiens can be a strategic asset in the modeling of city transformations
The role of realtime data in improving urban mobility planning