The Sapelli smartphone application aims to support any community to engage in citizen science activities to address local concerns and needs. However, Sapelli was designed and developed not as a piece of technology without a context, but as the technical part of a socio-technical approach to establish a participatory science process. This paper provides the methodological framework for implementing and using Sapelli in the field. Specifically, we present the role of Sapelli within the framework of an “Extreme Citizen Science” (ECS) methodology that is based on participatory design. This approach enables Sapelli’s users to decide, with the help of professional scientists, which challenges they wish to address, what data to collect, how best to collect and analyse it, and how to use it to address the problems identified. The process depends on the consent of participants and that the project is shaped by their decisions. We argue that leaving ample space for co-design, local leadership and keeping Sapelli deployment open-ended is crucial to give all people, and in particular non-literate people who we have found are often the most ecologically literate, access to the power of the scientific process to document and represent their concerns to outsiders in a way that all can understand, and to develop advocacy strategies that address the problems they identify.
Sub-Saharan Africa is often presented as the continent most vulnerable to climatic change with major repercussions for food systems. Coupled with high rates of population growth and existing nutritional deficiencies, the need to enhance food production across the continent is thus seen as a major global imperative. We argue here, however, that current models of agricultural development in Eastern Africa often marginalise critical small-holder knowledge from the process of future agricultural design due to a lack of a methodological tools for engagement. This paper addresses this by outlining a potential means to capture and share locally produced agronomic information on a large scale. We report on a ‘Citizen Science’ pilot study that worked with smallholder farmers in Elgeyo-Marakwet County, western Kenya, to co-design a mobile application using the well-developed Sapelli platform that easily allows farmers to identify, record and geolocate cropping patterns and challenges at multiple stages in the agricultural calendar using their own understandings. The pilot project demonstrated the technical and epistemological benefits of co-design, the abilities of smallholder farmers to co-design and use smartphone applications, and the potential for such technology to produce and share valuable agricultural and ecological knowledge in real time. Proof-of-concept data illustrates opportunities to spatially and temporally track and respond to challenges related to climate, crop disease and pests. Such work expounds how smallholder farmers are a source of largely untapped ecological and agronomic expert knowledge that can, and should, be harnessed to address issues of future agricultural resilience and food system sustainability.
The overwhelming global dominance of modern industrialism stifles the visibility of alternative ways of being in the present and of what solutions to large-scale challenges may be appropriate. This paper describes how novel high-tech digital tools can be co-designed with people with different worldviews or ‘ontologies’ to better represent their normally marginalised understandings, and so begin to generate a pluriverse of localised pathways to address the future. To do so, such digital tools are not considered as technological artefacts but as socio-technical processes designed around local worldviews to encode alternative understandings of local issues and local knowledge into data collection and visualisation processes. We describe how the Sapelli digital mapping tool is implemented through participatory co-design approaches with Indigenous people, farmers, and agro-pastoralists. Representing different cultures and local knowledge systems in a digital third space has revealed a plurality of approaches to addressing environmental change that differ substantially from those conventionally envisaged.
Citizen Science involves a collaboration or partnership between scientists and amateur volunteers, which may take various forms; from simple data collection to a close collaboration where both parts jointly define their aims, methodologies and analysis approaches in the scientific endeavour. Although citizen science has existed for more than two centuries (Silvertown, 2009), the widespread use of information and communication technology (ICT) now plays a significant role in the way citizen science is currently shaped and utilised. At present, there are hundreds of citizen science applications available which engage thousands of volunteers in the disciplines of astronomy, environmental conservation, biology, marine science, geography and many others. A relatively recent analysis of 388 citizen science projects revealed that they have been used to engage 1.3 million volunteers, contributing up to US$2.5 billion in-kind annually (Theobald et al. 2015).Web 2.0 and its associated technologies, which have existed for almost 15 years now, have enabled the development of websites which supported content generation by their end users (aka crowdsourcing; Howe, 2008) and multiple interactions amongst them. Examples include web-based communities, social-networking sites, wikis, mashups, and others (Batty et al., 2010). In this context the term 'Neogeography' was coined (Eisnor, 2006) and since then it has been used within the geographic and cartographic circles to describe the multi-directional generation of geospatial contents and interactions, which enables non-GIS professionals to create and share maps and other geographic information online "on their own terms" simply using the "elements of an existing toolset" (Eisnor, 2006). Map mashups started to not only be used for disseminating spatial information to a wider user audience, but applications have been created which enabled the crowdsourcing of geographic information for the production of geospatial knowledge; a trend, which is also known under the term Volunteered Geographic Information (Goodchild, 2007). OpenStreetMap (OSM) is perhaps one of the earliest examples that the literature cites to demonstrate how harnessing the power of the crowds for the collection of geographic information can result in the creation of a free, open source of map of the world (Goodchild, 2007;Haklay et al., 2008;Batty et al., 2010).We argue in this paper that the above developments from the geospatial context have massively contributed to the current state of citizen science. While interactive web maps made their appearance as mainly "way-finding" tools (Skarlatidou and Haklay, 2006), they quickly became part of digital interactions in a much broader context and they are currently a basic component of most citizen science projects. The relevance and significance of space has been fully exploited by technological features such as geotagging, GPS-enabled mobile devices fully integrated with other sensors, which has made the collection and sharing of data much easier (Haklay, 2013). Sinton ...
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