From Data Literacy to Co-design Environmental Monitoring Innovations and Civic Action

Funding Information: Acknowledgments. We would like to thank all the volunteers, partners, and authors who wrote and provided helpful comments for this publication writing process. We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation for South Karelia Region and the PERCCOM programme. We also give our gratitude for South-East Finland – Russia CBC programme for supporting AWARE project, funded by the European Union, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Finland as the funding has made it possible for publishing this work and disseminate the knowledge. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).SENSEI is an environmental monitoring initiative run by Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT University) and the municipality of Lappeenranta in south-east Finland. The aim was to collaboratively innovate and co-design, develop and deploy civic technologies with local civics to monitor positive and negative issues. These are planned to improve local’s participation to social governance issues in hand. These issues can be e.g. waste related matters like illegal dumping of waste, small vandalism into city properties, alien plant species, but on the other hand nice places to visits too. This publication presents initiatives data literacy facet overview, which is aimed at creating equitable access to information from open data, which in turn is hoped for to increase participants motivation and entrepreneurship like attitude to work with the municipals and the system. This is done by curating environmental datasets to allow participatory sensemaking via exploration, games and reflection, allowing citizens to combine their collective knowledge about the town with the often-complex data. The ultimate aim of this data literacy process is to enhance collective civic actions for the good of the environment, to reduce the resource burden in the municipality level and help citizens to be part of sustainability and environmental monitoring innovation activities. For further research, we suggest follow up studies to consider on similar activities e.g. in specific age groups and to do comparisons on working with different stage holders to pin point most appropriate methods for any specific focus group towards collaborative innovation and co-design of civic technologies deployment.Peer reviewe

Towards a global participatory platform: Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project's own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed. Graphical abstrac

Towards a global participatory platform Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project’s own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed

Collaborative Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays - BigWallHCI 2013 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop

The 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays in Situation Rooms and Monitoring Centres was co-organised by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, Austria. It took place in the European Crisis Management Laboratory (ECML) of the JRC in Ispra, Italy, from 18 to 19 April 2013. 40 participants from stakeholders in the EC, civil protection bodies, academia, and industry attended the workshop. The hardware of large display areas is on the one hand mature since many years and on the other hand changing rapidly and improving constantly. This high pace developments promise amazing new setups with respect to e.g., pixel density or touch interaction. On the software side there are two components with room for improvement: 1. the software provided by the display manufacturers to operate their video walls (source selection, windowing system, layout control) and 2. dedicated ICT systems developed to the very needs of crisis management practitioners and monitoring centre operators. While industry starts to focus more on the collaborative aspects of their operating software already, the customized and tailored ICT applications needed are still missing, unsatisfactory, or very expensive since they have to be developed from scratch many times. Main challenges identified to enhance big wall display systems in crisis management and situation monitoring contexts include: 1. Interaction: Overcome static layouts and/or passive information consumption. 2. Participatory Design & Development: Software needs to meet users’ needs. 3. Development and/or application of Information Visualisation & Visual Analytics principle to support the transition from data to information to knowledge. 4. Information Overload: Proper methods for attention management, automatic interpretation, incident detection, and alarm triggering are needed to deal with the ever growing amount of data to be analysed.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Large displays and tablets:Data exploration and its effects on data collection

Data is pivotal to open government initiatives, where citizens are often expected to be informed and actively participate. Yet, it can be difficult for people to understand the meaning of data. Presenting data to the public in an appropriate way may also increase citizen's willingness to participate in data collection. Here we present a study which explores how large screens can support socially relevant data exploration. In a between subject laboratory experiment, we analysed how pairs of participants explored data visualisations on a high-resolution display (LHRD) and a tablet. Our results indicate that LHRDs are less cognitively demanding, while tablets offer more shared control of the interface. Data exploration had limited effect on increasing comfort with sharing personal data but helped increase perceptions of trustworthiness within the data collection process. We observed that appropriately visualised data on either platform has significant potential to increase the public's understanding of large data sets

Making sense framework and assessment of participatory strategies

This report is a combined effort of Dundee University and the Joint Research Centre, based on the integration of D5.2 (Report and evaluation of the pilot approaches to ‘Making Sense campaigns’) and D4.3 (Report on assessment of participatory methods in the pilots and final recommendations). The document is structured as follows: Section 1 articulates the Making Sense approach to pilots and covers our campaign rationale, stakeholders and summarises the Making Sense pilots; Section 2 describes the design and iteration of the Making Sense Framework; Section 3 shows how the Making Sense Framework has been exemplified through the pilots and describes and illustrates each phase of the Framework with an example from a pilot; Section 4 focuses on ten key topics where we observed how citizen engagement and community building were addressed inside Making Sense and how the project participatory strategies developed from there on; Section 5 puts forward a new augmented version of previously devised recommendations for participatory or community driven sensing projects, with lessons learned from and for Making Sense.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

Artefact, Participant and Interaction in Auditory Experiences

Presented at the 27th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2022) 24-27 June 2022, Virtual conference.The act of sound perception and its subjective dimensions, from physical to psychoacoustics, from semantic to affective, carry an inherent challenge for the conception and evaluation of every audio-based artefact. Starting from a previous framework of evaluation approaches, we seek to deconstruct the configuring elements of these processes, searching for theoretical foundations informing Sound Design and possible applications for Auditory Displays. This work is a first step into identifying a body of knowledge on the listener’s experience, how the act of listening takes place and how the sequence of listening actions can evolve as forms of dialogue, creating dialogical spaces for making sense of auditory information. With this work, practitioners can gain new insights into how existing techniques for creating auditory artefacts can be configured and transformed into new, alternative approaches