Linking Citizen Science and Indigenous Knowledge: an avenue to sustainable development

Sustainable development is one of the most significant challenges humanity faces nowadays on global and local scales. Although historically communities accumulate immense information regarding the sustainable survival of their... [ view full abstract ]

Sustainable development is one of the most significant challenges humanity faces nowadays on global and local scales. Although historically communities accumulate immense information regarding the sustainable survival of their surrounding environments, only in the last decade there is growing recognition that Indigenous Knowledge (IK), specifically to Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), is critical for environmental and social sustainability.

In the context of sustainable development, citizen science can empower communities to share and apply their knowledge of local environmental conditions using scientifically accepted methods than can lead to improvements in environmental governance and social-environmental justice.

The challenge is to come up with tools and methodologies that can enable any user, regardless of his educational or literacy level, to understand, collect and share local conditions. Tools must be adapted to the specific socio-economic, ecological, cultural and technical contexts and most importantly, designed to empower users to act upon the analysis.

This symposium aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to share insights in understanding and engaging with underprivileged populations in both the developing and developed world, as well as to showcase research for designing, developing and evaluating Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems that enable lay users to capture knowledge, report in-situ observations, visualize and discuss results.

Speakers:

Michalis Vitos, University College London: Introduction

Dawn Wright, ESRI - Emerging Citizen Science Initiatives at ESRI

Michalis Vitos, University College London - Sapelli, a data collection platform for non-literate, citizen-scientists in the rainforest

Sam Sudar, University of Washington - Collecting data with Open-Data-Kit (ODK)

Tanya Birch, Google Earth - Outreach Community-based field data collection and Google mapping tools

20 minutes discussion with the audience