Using crowdsourcing to support pro-environmental community activism

Why is participation inequality important?

“…The use of a leader board and providing credits to emphasise the position of participants has been shown to encourage competition among contributors, but with a potential to alienate some participants and reduce their motivation (Massung et al 2013). The assumption that it is always valuable to encourage competition among participants to yield more information should be questioned, and there are alternative, such as the mechanism that encourage collaboration that Silvertwon et al (2015) offer.…”

“…Studies show that their internal and external motivations play an important part in maintaining their engagement with a project. For some participants, competition is a significant motivation (Massung et al 2013) while for others the joint contribution to science is a major one (Nov et al 2011). …”

PosterVote

“…[17,18,20,32]) by repositioning technology for data collection in the hands of grassroots instead of local councils. We believe that PosterVote is a step towards expanding the repertoire for local political activism with sustainable tools that will reinvigorate local democracies.…”

“…In the last few years, the role of online and digital technologies for political activism is receiving increased attention from the HCI community (e.g. [17,20,32]). New emerging fields in the area of HCI and electronic government are exploring the use of technology to bridge the gap between citizens and representatives on the local and national level.…”

Normification

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AbstractPrevious work [7] has shown how smartphone applications can support community activism groups by enabling crowdsourced data collection. In this paper we theorize that the data collected by the app can then be used to bring about positive environmental behavior change by illustrating the adoption of new social norms, a process we term normification.

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