Citizen Science tools to support community-based reseach

My project titled: "Making local knowledge matter for landslides and flooding preparedness" is part of the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) group at the Department of Geography, University College London (UCL) led by Muki Haklay and Jerome Lewis (UCL Anthropology).

Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) is a situated, bottom-up practice that takes into account local needs, practices and culture and works with broad networks of people to design and build new devices and knowledge creation processes that can transform the world. I work with the Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and Visualisation (ECSAnVis) which aims to develop geographical analysis and visualisation tools that can be used, successfully, by non-literate people and any other community in a culturally appropriate ways, that further fit their needs and social practices.

Through collaboration with Keystone Foundation, and Kattunayaka communities in South India, this project uses tools developed by ExCiteS in order to provide a geographical analysis and visualization platform and data that will enable to monitor trends and change over time in the deep areas of the forest. In addition, ethnographic work provides insights into people’s notions of their environment and particularly of landslide and flood events. This project is aimed to provide communities with the tools to conduct their own environmental data collection and research. It is also expected to generate new data of hydrologically-driven processes and their hyper-localized mechanisms and impacts and to help establish a better collaboration through a mutual and respectful discussion between scientists and local institutions, authorities and in particular local communities, which are often excluded from policymaking and research.