From Silos to Synergy: Enabling Distributed Collaboration in Citizen Science Water Quality Monitoring
Open Access
- Author:
- Gupta, Srishti
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 17, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Andrea Tapia, Major Field Member
Elizabeth Boyer, Outside Unit & Field Member
Jack Carroll, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Mary Beth Rosson, Major Field Member
Dongwon Lee, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- Sustainable HCI
Citizen Science
Community Informatics
Human-Centered Design - Abstract:
- The world's water resources are in crisis due to human activities and global warming. Countdown to `Day Zero' in Cape Town, South Africa, lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, and groundwater loss in northern India are some vivid examples of recent water crisis around the world. In the last few decades, citizen-based approaches to ensure adequate local supplies of good quality water have become a popular way of monitoring and ensuring water quality. Greater citizen-based volunteer activity in local water systems is associated with better water quality. Citizen-based monitoring activities are termed as citizen science, where citizens of a community participate in scientific endeavors in various capacities. However, citizen science projects leaders and volunteers often face common challenges such as lack of appropriate technical infrastructure for data management, insufficient protocols to ensure data quality control and assurance, and limited opportunities for community engagement and visibility. These challenges lead to citizen science data and work becoming undervalued and under-leveraged by the government and decision-makers. Innovations addressing these socio-technical challenges can be shared among various citizen science groups through peer-to-peer collaboration. However, water quality primarily presents a regional concern for citizen science groups, leading them to operate in isolation and redundantly reinvent solutions to address these shared challenges. Encouraging distributed or peer-to-peer collaboration between different citizen groups holds the potential to streamline citizen science activities, preventing unnecessary expenditure of resources and time on issues that can otherwise be efficiently resolved through information and resource exchange. This dissertation aims to facilitate collaboration among distributed citizen science water-monitoring groups. My goal is to design an online community for these groups, fostering knowledge sharing, providing infrastructure support, and elevating the visibility of their activities. This networked community promotes inclusivity in science by facilitating learning, knowledge exchange, and collective problem-solving among citizen science groups, ultimately amplifying their impact and visibility. Towards this vision, I used a sustainable human-centered design approach that places communities and their water resources at the center of the design endeavor. I structured my research roadmap into three developmental stages: initiating with an exploratory analysis of current practices, followed by an exploration of the design space, and culminating in the development and evaluation of a collaborative system. In the initial stage, I conducted exploratory research to understand citizens' motivations for participating in scientific endeavors and their approaches to monitoring and safeguarding local water resources. Subsequently, participatory design hackathons were organized to explore practices, challenges, and propose design recommendations. In the second stage, I analyzed the design landscape of citizen-based water quality monitoring applications, informing the development of a comprehensive citizen science data platform aligned with the goals and requirements identified in the first stage. Finally, I focused on designing and evaluating collaboration systems to assess the feasibility of such platforms, deriving design implications and directions for facilitating effective distributed collaboration. This was achieved by investigating whether a platform supporting social networking and distributed collaboration could effectively address the requirements and goals outlined in the initial two stages. A user study of a community watershed social networking application was conducted for this purpose. Based on the findings, collaboration with key citizen science stakeholders led to the design and development support of the final collaboration system, the "Water Data Collaborative," a platform connecting distributed citizen science groups. Participatory design sessions were conducted to assess its design and elicit recommendations for enhancing the Water Data Collaborative. This dissertation is situated within the multifaceted context of sustainable HCI and CSCW, highlighting citizen science as a pivotal component of both areas of research. It integrates the interdisciplinary realms of sustainable HCI, CSCW, citizen science, and community informatics to offer a fresh perspective on empowering communities to embrace data-driven practices, mutual learning, and the preservation of local water and environmental resources.