Opportunities and issues in using the interactive web for environmental

management.

Presentation to the School of Geography and Environmental Studies Annual Conference, June 2010.

An investigation into harnessing the interactive capabilities of the internet to facilitate community participation in environmental reporting and management.

Alister Clark

PhD Candidate

Interactive online mapping platforms The geospatial web 2.0

Mobile mapping – fast capture and distribution of geographic information

Other Web 2.0 Platforms and Social Media

TextPictures

VideoNews

BookmarksPeople

Existing Gweb2 portals for environmental management

Citizen Science

REDMAP Spot, log and map fish on the move in Tasmanian waters.

MySwanA place for people who share an interest in Black Swans.

Atlas of Living AustraliaSharing biodiversity knowledge.

Management Activities

FERALSCAN

Help map feral animal sightings in your area.

wePlan

Where you can have your say about the future of Victoria’s parks.

Values

PlaceStories - Supporting the storytelling, networking and digital communication needs of community organisations, government agencies and others who work with communities, particularly rural and regional areas.

The potential for community based GWeb2 portals

• Why do it the way they want you to? Do it yourself your own way.

• Make your own map, wiki, blog, site with photos, videos etc. and share it.

• Create your own community with Facebook, Linkedin, Google groups etc.

Can anybody / everybody, will anybody / everybody?

Access, literacy and time.

Motivation – what’s in it for me?

Risks – security, fraud, vandalism…

Chaos and confusion

If people do participate, won’t it just create chaos and confusion:

• A plethora of minutiae of variable rigour, standard, comparability?

• Lots of information from the wrong people about the wrong stuff of the wrong quality?

• A free-for-all for hackers, vandals, users and other mischief makers?

From chaos to a complex adaptive system (CAS)

• Ecological and human systems (including the internet) are complex adaptive systems.

• Interacting, loosely coupled agents that self-organise to adapt to the current context.

• Self-organisation creates emergent properties that provide further context and adaptation.

• Develop and evolve in a recursive manner, are non-linear.• Cannot totally control CAS otherwise ceases to function

as CAS, stagnates and dies.• Cannot predict what will emerge, only observe and guide.

Criteria for Complex Adaptive Systems

• Openness versus control • Connections enabled but

loosely coupled• Variety• Sub-optimal, just good

enough.• Simple rules

Self-organisation and emergent properties in the web 2.0 world

Activity, classifying, rating and reviewing.

Networks, groups, communities of interest.

Governance, rules, standards, and technological fixes.

How to investigate this? Just do it!Participatory Action Research

Adaptive Resource Management

The Electronic Environmental Agora

A place to gather and collaborate: StateofourEnvironment (SoOE) The SoOE Wiki The SoOE Map

Seeded with explanations and examples.

People invited and allowed participate collaborate.

Minimal control - see what happens?

Analyse, communicate, seed / guide some more, observe, analyse, communicate etc. etc. etc…

Quantitative and qualitative measures

Who does what, when, where, how – the numbers – and maybe why?

What participants think about what they do when where, how and why?

Communicate……Thesis!