GEO-C:Enabling open cities and the open city toolkit

The GEO-C doctoral programme, entitled “Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities”, is funded by the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (International Training Networks (ITN), European Joint Doctorates) until December 2018, and is managed by three European universities in Germany, Portugal and Spain. 15 doctoral grantholders (Early Stage Researchers) were selected to work on specific three-year projects, all contributing to improving the notion of open cities, and specifically to an Open City Toolkit of methodologies, code, and best practice examples. Contributions include volunteered geographic information (VGI), public information displays, mobility apps to encourage green living, providing open data to immigrant populations, reducing the second-order digital divide, sensing of quality of life, proximity based privacy protection, and spatio-temporal online social media analysis. All doctoral students conducted long-term visits and were embedded in city governments and businesses, to gain experience from multiple perspectives in addition to the researcher and users’ perspective. The projects are situated within three areas: transparency, participation, and collaboration. They took mostly a bottom-up (citizen-centric) approach to (smart) open cities, rather than relying on large IT companies to create smart open cities in a top-down manner. This paper discusses the various contributions to enabling open cities, explains in some detail the Open City Toolkit, and its possible uses and impact on stakeholders. A follow-up doctoral program has been solicited and, if successful, will continue this line of research and will strengthen aspects of privacy, data provenance, and trust, in an effort to improve relations between data (e.g. news) publishers and consumers

Codiseño de un chatbot para facilitar procedimientos administrativos a población migrada.

El artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación focalizada en conocer, mediante la metodología de codiseño, cómo las tecnologías móviles pueden apoyar a las personas migradas. Los datos se obtuvieron mediante un diagnóstico a través de cinco talleres de análisis y conocimiento del contexto, y cinco de elaboración de escenarios, realizados en Barcelona en las entidades sociales que forman parte del equipo investigador. En total, participaron 86 personas migradas (38 mujeres y 48 hombres) de países, edades y niveles educativos diversos, y que llevaban más de un año viviendo en Barcelona. Los resultados muestran un alto uso de los teléfonos inteligentes y un conocimiento generalizado de las aplicaciones que se utilizan principalmente para la comunicación. Además, las experiencias de las personas migradas indican que pueden usar las herramientas existentes para acceder a la información, pero que necesitan soporte adicional para aprovechar al máximo las herramientas móviles disponibles. Ello sugiere oportunidades para crear herramientas móviles que permitan el desarrollo de nuevas habilidades. Con este fin, se ha desarrollado y validado un chatbot en Facebook y Messenger para ayudar a la población migrada con los procedimientos administrativos, y al que pueden recurrir también las entidades del tercer sector

Food Aid Technology:The Experience of a Syrian Refugee Community in Coping with Food Insecurity

Over half of Syrian refugee households in Lebanon are food insecure with some reliant on an electronic voucher (e-voucher) system for food aid. The interplay between the digitisation of food aid, within the socio-technical context of refugees, and community collaborative practices is yet to be investigated. Through design engagements and interviews with refugees and shop owners we explore the experiences of a Syrian refugee community in Lebanon using the e-voucher system. We provide insights into the socio-technical environment in which the e-voucher system is dispensing aid, the information and power asymmetries experienced, refugee collaborative coping practices and how they interplay with the e-voucher system. We highlight the need for: (1) expanding refugee digital capabilities to encompass understandings of aid technologies and identifying trusted intermediaries and (2) for technologies to support in upholding humanitarian principles and mitigating power and information asymmetries. Lastly, we call for CSCW researchers and humanitarian innovators to consider how humanitarian technologies can enable refugee collaborative practices and adopt everyday security as a lens for designing aid technologies. The paper contributes to CSCW knowledge regarding the interplay between aid technologies and refugees’ socio-technical contexts and practices that provides a basis for future technological designs for collaborative technologies for refugee food security

Supporting forced migrant resettlement with a location based freecycling service

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesForced migrants face many challenges when trying to settle into life in a new city. Social isolation is one common consequence of the upheaval they experience. Research has shown that technology can ease various parts of the resettlement process, but work is needed to see how it can address social isolation in particular. We hypothesized that a location-based freecycling service would be particularly suitable for this purpose, due to freecycling's potential to bolster social engagement and location-based services' ability to adapt to the user's context. We conducted needs assessment interviews with ve forced migrants and six freecyclers in M unster, Germany. We analyzed the results of the interviews to develop user requirements for a theoretical service. We implemented a subset of the user requirements as part of a prototype mobile app. Then we evaluated the app with 6 forced migrants and 16 freecyclers during a two-week trial. Our investigation showed that, with careful design, a location-based freecycling service can meet the needs of both locally established freecyclers and forced migrants seeking to reduce their social isolation. These ndings contribute to literature on the needs of forced migrants and how to meet those needs with geospatial technologies. Our ndings can bene t researchers of forced migrant social isolation and developers of location-based and other services to support forced migrant resettlement

La investigación sobre el diseño participativo de entornos digitales de aprendizaje

El codiseño es un tipo de investigación participativa que tiene como objetivo construir conocimiento a partir de la participación en el proceso de investigación de la población afectada por una situación o un problema. Halskov & Hansen (2015) señalan que hay tres aspectos comunes en este tipo de investigación. En primer lugar, subyace una orientación política e ideológica, que se concreta en dar la oportunidad de influir a partir de la participación en el diseño. En segundo lugar, el contexto caracteriza la situación general de partida del diseño y, en tercer lugar, las personas que participan como expertas en las diferentes etapas y acciones utilizan métodos que son los medios que tienen los participantes de influir en el diseño mientras que los productos son los resultados del diseño. El objetivo de esta contribución es estudiar el uso del codiseño para avanzar en la creación de diseños tecnológicos que respondan a las necesidades educativas. Las preguntas formuladas se agrupan alrededor de tres temas (tabla 1): la planificación e implementación del diseño participativo, las técnicas e instrumentos de investigación y los resultados del diseño participativ

Focus: Implementing participation - Advancement of social services in analog and digital spaces

Digitale Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien gewinnen als fester Bestandteil zunehmend Bedeutung in den alltäglichen Lebenswelten einer wachsenden Zahl von Menschen. Ihre Entwicklung und selbstverständliche Nutzung schreiten in einem immer rasanteren Tempo voran; die vielfältigen Anwendungsmöglichkeiten adressieren längst alle Lebensbereiche. Während der Digitalisierung von Kommunikationsprozessen zuweilen demokratisierende Kräfte zugesprochen werden, scheint eine kritische Reflexion möglicher Potentiale und Auswirkungen digitaler Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien auf Teilhabedynamiken in unterschiedlichen Lebensbereichen dringend erforderlich. Die Autorinnen und Autoren möchten mit dieser SI:SO-Schwerpunktausgabe einen Beitrag zu einer kritischen Reflexion digitaler Innovationen und ihrer Auswirkungen auf die zukünftige Gestaltung sozialer Dienste leisten. Mit der zweisprachigen Ausgabe ist zudem die Hoffnung verbunden, diesen Beitrag auch einem europäischen und weltweiten Publikum zugänglich zu machen.Digital information and communications technologies are becoming an increasingly important part in everyday life of a growing number of people. Their development and natural use are progressing even faster with a wide range of possible applications addressing all areas of life. While the digitization of communication processes is sometimes said to have democratizing forces, critical reflection on the potential and impact of digital information and communication technologies on participation dynamics in different areas of life seems urgently needed. The Authors would like to contribute to a critical reflection on digital innovations and their impact on the future design of social services. The bilingual edition further aims to make this contribution accessible to a European and global audience

Exploring the role of technologies in building Syrian refugee community resilience

PhD ThesisWe are witnessing the largest humanitarian crises occurring within the digital age. The ubiquity of digital technologies has created a space for digital humanitarianism. Digital humanitarianism has been tied to concepts of community resilience by critics of both fields. Humanitarian academics call for a critical investigation of these concepts that accounts for the socio-political, cultural and economic contexts in which they are applied. However, empirical research at the intersection of digital humanitarianism and community resilience is lacking. In this thesis I explore how digital technologies may contribute to refugee community resilience, using an Experience-Centred Design (ECD) research approach to engage with Syrian refugee women residing in an informal settlement in Lebanon. Through the issue of food security, I engage in an exploratory study using focus groups, dialogue cards and the co-creation of an advocacy artefact to explore refugee participants’ understandings of community resilience and how a technology designed for improving refugee food insecurity can contribute to their community resilience. I further use paper prototypes to engage with participants to mimic potential future experiences of technologically mediated collective purchasing. The data collected with refugee participants is augmented by interviews with other stakeholders in the food aid system. Additionally, I use autoethnographic methods to reflect on the value of ECD within this context. I highlight the potential for community-designed humanitarian technologies to increase refugee agency, facilitate self-mobilisation and consequently contribute to refugee community resilience. I also emphasise the need, when designing technologies for community resilience, to account for subcommunities that form within geographically defined refugee communities. My findings extend the concepts of community resilience and digital humanitarianism by envisioning refugee-community-driven technology and using ECD as a methodology for designing with refugee communities