IoT Community Technologies: Leaving Users to Their Own Devices or Orchestration of Engagement?

TLDR

Citizens increasingly crowdfund IoT participatory sensing tools to collect and share environmental data, aiming to broaden access to political action tools. The study compares participation patterns and user experience over 15 months in two Smart Citizen communities and investigates how crowdfunding does not guarantee active participation. The authors analyze two Smart Citizen communities over 15 months, using the tool’s data and user experience metrics, and propose guidelines for sustained engagement through local champion orchestration, skill‑embedding social interactions, and reward mechanisms. Technology issues and unreliable data hindered participation, but in one community challenges were mitigated by orchestrated actions led by local champions.

Abstract

Citizens are increasingly crowdfunding IoT based participatory sensing technologies that allow them to collect and share data about the environment. These initiatives are usually referred to as grassroots and are driven by a vision of widening access to tools for political action. In this paper we compare patterns of participation and user experience over 15 months in two distinct communities using ‘Smart Citizen’, a crowdfunded IoT participatory sensing tool. Our studies reveal that technology issues and a lack of reliability of the sensed data hindered user participation. However, in one of the communities, many of these challenges were overcome through orchestrated actions led by community champions. We discuss how crowdfunding doesn’t necessarily translate into active participation and provide guidelines on how to achieve sustained engagement in crowdfunded IoT community sensing projects: enable distributed orchestration provided by local champions, encourage social interactions that embed skills and learning, and facilitate meaningful participation and reward mechanisms among community members.