A GUERILLA APPROACH TO CONTROL SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

Abstract We present our experiences in managing the development cycles of the control systems for ANKA and the ALMA Common Software. Our team consists practically only of undergraduate students. Stimulating and rewarding the students with cutting-edge technologies and travel to conferences like this and installation fieldwork are an important positive factor in raising their motivation. However, building any system with a group of inexperienced students is quite a challenging task. Many problems occur with planning deadlines and missing them, organizing and managing development, sources, and documentation and also when dealing with conventional program management rules. To cope with them, we use many tools: CVS for versioning and source archiving, Bugzilla for keeping our bugs in order, a to-do list for managing tasks, an activity log and also many other programs and scripts, some found on the Internet and some made by ourselves. In the end, we had to become organized like a professional company. Documentation and demos can be found on our homepage: http://kgb.ijs.si/KGB. Because of powerful intranet/web front-ends of all those tools, our Internet pages are the central resource for developers, who work mostly off-site

Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science or Volunteered Geographic Information? The Current State of Crowdsourced Geographic Information

Citizens are increasingly becoming an important source of geographic information, sometimes entering domains that had until recently been the exclusive realm of authoritative agencies. This activity has a very diverse character as it can, amongst other things, be active or passive, involve spatial or aspatial data and the data provided can be variable in terms of key attributes such as format, description and quality. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there are a variety of terms used to describe data arising from citizens. In this article, the expressions used to describe citizen sensing of geographic information are reviewed and their use over time explored, prior to categorizing them and highlighting key issues in the current state of the subject. The latter involved a review of ~100 Internet sites with particular focus on their thematic topic, the nature of the data and issues such as incentives for contributors. This review suggests that most sites involve active rather than passive contribution, with citizens typically motivated by the desire to aid a worthy cause, often receiving little training. As such, this article provides a snapshot of the role of citizens in crowdsourcing geographic information and a guide to the current status of this rapidly emerging and evolving subject

WUDAPT: an urban weather, climate and environmental modeling infrastructure for the Anthropocene

WUDAPT is an international community-based initiative to acquire and disseminate climate relevant data on the physical geographies of cities for modeling and analyses purposes. The current lacuna of globally consistent information on cities is a major impediment to urban climate science towards informing and developing climate mitigation and adaptation strategies at urban scales. WUDAPT consists of a database and a portal system; its database is structured into a hierarchy representing different levels of detail and the data are acquired using innovative protocols that utilize crowdsourcing approaches, Geowiki tools, freely accessible data, and building typology archetypes. The base level of information (L0) consists of Local Climate Zones (LCZ) maps of cities; each LCZ category is associated with range of values for model relevant surface descriptors (e.g. roughness, impervious surface cover, roof area, building heights, etc.). Levels 1 (L1) and 2 (L2) will provide specific intraurban values for other relevant descriptors at greater precision, such as data morphological forms, material composition data and energy usage. This article describes the status of the WUDAPT project and demonstrates its potential value using observations and models. As a community-based project, other researchers are encouraged to participate to help create a global urban database of value to urban climate scientists

A GUERILLA APPROACH TO CONTROL SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

Abstract We present our experiences in managing the development cycles of the control systems for ANKA and the ALMA Common Software. Our team consists practically only of undergraduate students. Stimulating and rewarding the students with cutting-edge technologies and travel to conferences like this and installation fieldwork are an important positive factor in raising their motivation. However, building any system with a group of inexperienced students is quite a challenging task. Many problems occur with planning deadlines and missing them, organizing and managing development, sources, and documentation and also when dealing with conventional program management rules. To cope with them, we use many tools: CVS for versioning and source archiving, Bugzilla for keeping our bugs in order, a to-do list for managing tasks, an activity log and also many other programs and scripts, some found on the Internet and some made by ourselves. In the end, we had to become organized like a professional company. Documentation and demos can be found on our homepage: http://kgb.ijs.si/KGB. Because of powerful intranet/web front-ends of all those tools, our Internet pages are the central resource for developers, who work mostly off-site