Contributors of Volunteered Geographic World: Motivation behind Contribution

“Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is the harnessing of tools to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals.”

(Goodchild, 2007)

Group 2

Ankita Agrawal

Rupa Tiwari

“These are just a few examples of a phenomenon that has taken the world of

geographic information by storm and has the potential to redefine the traditional

roles of mapping agencies and companies." – Goodchild

Examples include WikiMapia, OpenStreetMap, GISCorps, Gypsii, Google Earth,

Cyclopath etc.

Problem Motivation

Motivation behind VGI….• There’s a new road that we don’t have in GPS. “A new route” !• Governments are reluctant to pay for increasing costs of mapping.• Developing countries do not have digital street map.• Disaster Management

Motivation behind contributors…• Helps in designing VGI project in better and appealing way.• Need for new volunteers and retain existing ones.• Decreasing pool of volunteers [Independent Sector, 2001]• Problems in volunteer’s retention to an organization [Bussel &

Forbes 2002].

Ushahidi.com

“The open source Open Street Map (OSM) project plans to lend its support by calling for volunteers to update its maps of Chile on the basis of the latest satellite images. This will assist orientation and coordination of aid teams in Chile.”

Problem Statement

GivenA set of VGI projects and spatial volunteers

FindA ranked list of motivations factors behind volunteerism activity of volunteers

ObjectiveBetter design of future VGI projects and improvement of existing VGI projects by eradicating volunteer motivation issues or problems.

ConstraintsTo find a complete and correct list with proper ranking of motivational factors.

Proposed Solution

Methodology Applied•Humans will be subject of research.•Design of questionnaire.•Review and revision of questionnaire•Questionnaire will be presented as web survey.•Collected results would be analyzed.•Result analysis would lead to the ranked list of motivational factors and comparison with already identified volunteer motivation factors.

Innovativeness•Previous research [by Snyder & Clary]were done in 90’s. Till then there is change in economy and availability of technology.•The data is collected entirely from spatial volunteers.•Goodchild has not mentioned any experimental approach to evaluate reasons behind motivation.

Next Steps

• Pilot study of questionnaire.• Approval from Institutional Review Board (IRB) • Publish questionnaire.• Data preprocessing.• Explore data mining techniques• Explore statistical techniques• Analyze results.

Thanks !