Important issues to take into consideration when crowdsourcing/open sourcing a city

While defining the delimitation of the thesis, many issues have come into my mind that must be discussed, as they lay some considerations for the limitations of the study and project proposed.

Representation is a key one because, as we know, not everyone is actually online. Even though numbers are growing, most estimates put the figures of internet access in the world between a 1 and 1,5 billion, mostly concentrated in the “developed” world and, even here, more within young, middle-to-upper class males.

While this may be true, it is not indicative that which ever city decides to approach a project of this nature will get the response of only/mostly this demographic since interest truly serve as a magnetic force towards topics and sites in the Internet, like I doubt that this demographic is the dominant one in Knitty, an online magazine about knitting.

None the less, we should be aware of this, since the effort must be planned to reach out to a representative demographic so that the discussion is held by all who live in the city (or at the very least, very close to representative) and with a broad range of topics and tasks to draw in different interests groups.

Strategies for increasing education about internet use in demographics of the population where this may lack along with actions to increase physical internet access in areas of the city where this is weak, restricted or non-existent, must be undertaken to broaden the scope of population with the knowledge, skill and possibility to use and access a project of this nature.

Security issues as well must be addressed, as it is almost an impossible word to forget when discussing the Internet. Much of the distrust that lies in the online world is based upon the stories and threats of hacks, identity theft or misrepresentation/tilting of choice by groups for particular benefit using knowledge of technology as a leverage tool. While all of these are true dangers, it is the digital equivalent to any “real” world security threat brought upon by criminal acts.

A project put in place to crowdsource a city must approach security threats with much detail, like most business initiatives online, but more importantly, would benefit greatly were it to obtain true engagement by it’s citizen-participants. A combination between technological measures in addition to a committed-to-the-cause crowd has arguably (important word) been one of the security successes of Wikipedia (as exemplified here) and others.

Most importantly about these considerations, in my opinion, is to actually discuss them. Many of the thoughts behind the considerations I’ve discussed in this post have come from the comments and links that were the result of the participation that occurred in the post about the crowdsourcing the city question. Like the project itself tries to prove, things are done better when many are participating, including discussions.

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