The general aim of the project is to build citizen capacity in reporting and monitoring water pollution and to promote community active involvement in raising awareness, education and decision making. The outcomes of the project will contribute with deeper understanding of the public-expert relationships, will enable two-way dialogues between various stakeholders and communities, will offer citizens an opportunity to voice concern regarding water issues and ecosystem services loss, and will enhance understanding of citizen perspective in participating to citizen science projects. The project strategy is to develop a user-friendly and free platform for collecting water related data (waste disposal, deteriorated shorelines, water color, water level, use etc.), on long-term using a predefined set of tools, visual observations, photos, videos, existing smartphones applications. Citizen perception on the programs and their relationship with the environment will be evaluated using surveys. Based on a non-traditional approach, an opportunistic sensing model will also be developed by analyzing crowd-generated data from social media content to extract information regarding water related issues.
The delivery of the main aim of this project will be achieved through the following specific objectives:
- Specific Objective 1 (SO1) is to establish the knowledge exchange and the connectivity between citizens, science, policy and decision makers in water management
- Specific Objective 2 (SO2) is to understand the dynamics and drivers in citizen science programs and community perception on value and limitations of crowd-generated data
- Specific Objective 3 (SO3) is to achieve a free and user-friendly platform applicable on long-term for reporting water related issues at national scale and at various communication levels.
- Specific Objective 4 (SO4) is to obtain a pool of crowd-generated data by mining social media content for water related issues and by using volunteers for sampling urban water and collecting data
- Specific Objective 5 (SO5) is to determine the degree of citizen involvement in water quality monitoring programs at national scale compared to international participatory actions