Identifying success factors in crowdsourced geographic information use in government
A few weeks ago, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), published an update for the report from 2014 on the use of crowdsourced geographic information in government. The 2014 report was very successful – it has been downloaded almost 1,800 times from 41 countries around the world in about 3 years (with more than 40 academic references) which showed the interests of researchers and policymakers alike and outlined its usability. On the base of it, it was pleasing to be approached by GFDRR about a year ago, with a request to update it.
In preparation for this update, we sought comments and reviews from experts and people who used the report regarding possible improvements and amendments. This feedback helped to surface that the seven key factors highlighted by the first report as the ones that shaped the use of VGI in government (namely: incentives, aims, stakeholders, engagement, technical aspects, success factors, and problems) have developed both independently and in cross-cutting modes and today there is a new reality for the use of VGI in government.
Luckily, in the time between the first report and the beginning of the new project, I learned about Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) in the Giving Time event and therefore we added Matt Ryan to our team to help us with the analysis. QCA allowed us to take 50 cases, have an intensive face to face team workshop in June last year to code all the cases and agree on the way we create the input to QCA. This helped us in creating multiple models that provide us with an analysis of the success factors that help explain the cases that we deemed successful. We have used the fuzzy logic version of QCA, which allowed a more nuanced analysis.
Finally, in order to make the report accessible, we created a short version, which provides a policy brief to the success factors, and then the full report with the description of each case study.
It was pleasure working with the excellent team of researchers that worked on this report: Vyron Antoniou, Hellenic Army Geographic Directorate, Sofia Basiouka, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sport, Robert Soden, World Bank, Global Facility for Disaster Reduction & Recovery (GFDRR), Vivien Deparday, World Bank, Global Facility for Disaster Reduction & Recovery (GFDRR). Matthew Ryan, University of Southampton, and Peter Mooney, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. We were especially lucky to be helped by Madeleine Hatfield of Yellowback Publishing who helped us in editing the report and making it better structured and much more readable.
The full report, which is titled “Identifying success factors in crowdsourced geographic information use in government” is available here.