Citizen-friendly participatory campaign support

Abstract

Participatory sensing, which appropriates wearable devices such as mobile phones to enable ad-hoc, person-centric mobile sensing networks, has the potential of delivering datasets with high spatio-temporal granularity. We argue that to obtain such datasets the concept of a participatory campaign, a recipe for gathering data to answer a particular concern, is essential, and that technological support for organising such campaigns is currently lacking. Campaign support is crucial to ensure that a dataset of adequate quality is gathered to study the concern under consideration, and additionally, to empower communities by providing them with a tool to answer local concerns and set up grassroots sensing actions without having to wait for an institutionalised action to take place. In this article we present a proof-of-concept architecture for participatory campaigns. The latter is built upon a formal definition of a campaign and the description of a campaign lifecycle, both of which are distilled out of earlier expertise with and related work on organising participatory sensing campaigns.