Project+Description

Our project aims to investigate—and extend—the potential of mobile phone-based sensing to increase citizens’ ability to participate in local environmental issues. We ask: **How can aggregation and visualization technologies be made //usable// by individuals with varying levels of technical expertise?** **And how can aggregated data be organized and presented in such a way that it becomes //useful// to citizens in their efforts to influence policymakers?** We will begin addressing these challenges by designing and evaluating a system that will allow residents of low-income, minority neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, to collect and visualize their sensory experiences of pollution from a nearby Mittal Steel plant. Using participatory design, iterative testing, and qualitative and quantitative measures, we are developing an urban sensing system using mobile phones and the open source crowdsourcing disaster reporting system Ushahidi. This phase of the project for which we are requesting funding and advice from Google will focus on organizing and visualizing information for this application.
 * Abstract **
 * Project** **Questions and Description:**

** How can urban sensing data be visualized for usefulness and usability by local citizens, policy makers, and other stakeholders around the Mittal neighborhoods? ** ** How can urban sensing data be organized to make data entry and retrieval effective and simple for these communities? **

The ubiquity of mobile phones, combined with online applications that aggregate and visualize disparate data types, offers communities, even those without specialized expertise, the opportunity to represent information in graphical formats. However, technical questions about the actual impact of urban sensing persist. Our project aims to investigate—and extend—the potential of mobile phone-based urban sensing to increase citizens’ ability to participate in local environmental issues by designing and evaluating a system that will allow residents of low-income, minority neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, to collect and visualize their sensory experiences of pollution from a nearby Mittal Steel plant. The Mittal Steel plant in Cleveland, Ohio, is surrounded by a number of residential neighborhoods, most populated by low-income individuals and people of color. Residents of these neighborhoods regularly smell and even taste toxic chemicals released from the plant, hear the noises of steel production, see flares and fires when accidents occur, and feel the effects of plant operations on their health. Organized into a group called the Neighbors of Mittal Steel, residents have campaigned to convince the plant to reduce their environmental impacts and sign a good neighbor agreement with the community; their campaign has included efforts to collect and use data that will be persuasive to Mittal officials and environmental regulators. Recording and documenting the harms done by pollution is an on-going challenge for such communities and their allies. Since these groups almost invariably lack technical training and extensive resources the design of sustainable information-gathering systems such as Neighborhood Senses must incorporate inexpensive input devices, easily understood interfaces, and clear data reporting tools. Examples of such crowd sourcing applications for environmental information and crisis management include the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and blogs used after the 2006 Mumbai terrorist attacks on the city’s train system. However, thus far little work has been done to examine the degree to which these systems are, in fact, empowering. Few researchers have investigated whether, and under what circumstances, citizens actually use these systems. Whether the representations they produce have helped citizens to influence decision makers also has not been systematically studied.

** Existing Technology ** As currently envisioned, the system will take diverse user input from mobile phones, including text messages, email, photographs, and voice mails, and translate them into machine-readable, time- and location-tagged formats. It will create interactive, web-based graphics, designed by users, to display the resulting data. The system will use the automatic localization capabilities of GPS-equipped mobile phones and take advantage of open source applications for data sharing, such as Flickr, Google Maps, and especially a platform for visualizing SMS (text) data. However, not all of Neighborhood Senses requirements can be fulfilled using these tools alone, largely due to the technological capacities of community users. Most mobile phones in use in the low-income communities surrounding industrial facilities are not GPS-equipped. Also, residents may not be able to send text messages without incurring additional fees. To ensure the broadest possible participation, the team is committed to developing open source software that translates voice messages to text into existing platforms, and developing additional software to turn textual data (e.g. “9th & Superior”) into geospatial data (e.g. longitude and latitude for the corner of 9th Street and Superior Avenue). The team has already identified an appropriate open-source back-end for capturing data: Ushahidi (Ushahidi.org). Ushahidi was initially developed to map reports of election violence in Kenya in 2008. It has grown into and open-source system for documenting other disasters around the world. It is currently being used to document environmental and other violations in the wake of the British Petroleum/Deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (documented on the Ushahidi blog at http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/05/08/labb/). ** Research Design ** The aim of Phase 1 of the project is to produce a user-designed system that translates mobile phone-based reports of sensory experiences into time- and location-tagged graphical data. This phase will examine urban sensing disaster management practices as a way of incorporating lessons learned from past experiences into the Neighborhood Senses system. Dr. Ramanathan has been developing the phone-based application to feed information into Ushahidi, developing and evaluating data visualizations through user studies, iterating designs with the Mittal neighborhood participants, and refining the application for impact are crucial steps. ** Outcomes: ** Phase 1 will result in the successful development and deployment of an urban sensing system for gathering environmental sensory data. Primary measures of success will be whether the system is useable and scaleable, whether Mittal neighbors are satisfied with it, and how many user-designers commit to continuing their work in Phase 2. The aims of Phase 2 will be to (a) refine the system based on field testing, (b) promote widespread use in Cleveland, and (c) evaluate its effectiveness in good neighbor campaigns. Primary measures of success will be how many people make reports and how much attention and interest the system generates from local stakeholders with an interest in influencing policy. Phase 3 will disseminate the system to other communities. The number of communities adopting the system, and the impacts on community campaigns will be primary measures of success in Phase 3.