Understanding civic participation in environmental sensing: A values driven approach

Engaging citizens is a major goal for governments, scientists and businesses, as their participation or lack of it can have a big impact on issues of common interest. This is true in particular for civic technologies such as participatory sensing (PS), which fully relies on citizens’ active participation for monitoring tasks. Current research is largely focused on providing incentives to people to increase their participation. Yet, this approach has not proven to be fully effective. Hence, there is a current need to understand the underlying motivations of people to join, participate and abandon PS. I propose to study the dynamics of motivation from a value driven perspective. This research will develop novel civic technology design approaches aimed at enhancing engagement, as well as to environmental data representation, analysis and curation. I aim to advance the understanding of what motivates people to engage in PS in environmental monitoring contexts.