Using Classic Methods in a Networked Manner: Seeing Volunteered Spatial Information in a Bottom-up Fashion

Using new social media and ICT infrastructures for self-organization, more and more citizen networks and business sectors organize themselves voluntarily around sustainability themes. The paper traces and evaluates one emerging innovation in such bottom-up, networked form of sustainable governance: The use of sensor data by citizen communities. In such ‘bottom-up community initiatives’, the sensed data is published on Internet presenting real-time, web-based GIS maps about issues like noise, air quality or earthquakes. In the study, two particular cases are analyzed to trace the emergence and network operation of such a ‘networked’ geo-information tool in practice: (1) The Airplane Monitor Schiphol and (2) The Groningen earthquake monitor. The paper discusses how in these cases, citizen sensor networks are combining classical methodological approaches with enabling infrastructures and data sources. We find the makers creatively blend classic methods with newly available open data & information technologies. The tools are working as “social boundary objects,” as information hubs, which co-evolve with and reinforce the power of the citizen initiative as a network. The paper concludes with a discussion of two propositions: (1) Computer and Internet technology co-evolve with method advancement in planning, and (2) Citizen sensor networks work as embodied method for hypothesis falsification.