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Engaging the Commons in Participatory Sensing: Practice, Problems, and Promise in the Context of Dockless Bikesharing

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Participatory sensing refers to the sensing paradigm where human participants use personal mobile devices to generate and share data from their surroundings. It holds the promise of providing information that is otherwise challenging to access, which sets the stage for understanding and resolving various social issues. However, difficulties in engaging participants often hinder the fulfillment of this promise. The current paper presents a qualitative study in the context of dockless bikesharing, where participatory sensing constitutes a backbone of the bike status monitoring system. We conducted in-depth interviews with 30 participants. These participants came from different emergent groups who took part in filing status reports for shared bikes. Our analysis indicated close associations among participants' models of engagement, their perceived (dis)connections with the sensing data, and their situated interpretation of the incentives. Based on these findings, we propose ways to engage the commons in participatory sensing for dockless bikesharing and beyond.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2020
10688 pages
ISBN:9781450367080
DOI:10.1145/3313831
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Published: 23 April 2020

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  1. dockless bikesharing
  2. engagement
  3. participatory sensing
  4. smart city
  5. urban transportation

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  • (2022)Active Governance and Smart CitizenshipSmart Cities, Citizen Welfare, and the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals10.4018/978-1-7998-7785-1.ch016(290-296)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2022)What Do Users Think of Promotional Gamification Schemes? A Qualitative Case Study in a Question Answering WebsiteProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35551246:CSCW2(1-34)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
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  • (2022)What Kinds of Experiences Do You Desire? A Preliminary Study of the Desired Experiences of Contributors to Location-Based Mobile CrowdsourcingExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519744(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
  • (2020)TMSA: Participatory Sensing Based on Mobile Phones in Urban SpacesIntelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning – IDEAL 202010.1007/978-3-030-62362-3_23(257-267)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2020

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