Lowering the barrier: how the what-you-see-is-what-you-map paradigm enables people to contribute volunteered geographic information

Abstract

In developing countries, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can be a valuable source of information, as often no detailed geo-data is available. Furthermore, it enables to aggregate local knowledge that can only be provided by local stakeholders. However, due to the complexity of tools and workflows of VGI applications, the participation within VGI projects is typically limited to technically skilled persons. We propose to focus on task-specific interfaces to integrate inexperienced user groups in the data collection process. For the example of micro-mapping we show how What-You-See-Is-What-You-Map (WYSIWYM) interfaces can lower the technological barriers compared to generic user interfaces and allow the contribution of precise geometric geographic data even for technologically uneducated persons. We report on two user studies in two different settings: the first study compares the general quantitative and qualitative aspects of user-generated data of three different geographic data collection tools, and the second study investigates the robustness of these results with a focus on the technological barrier with technologically untrained farmers in rural Laos. We are able to show that WYSIWYM interfaces foster the contribution of data of promising quality and at the same time significantly lower the barrier of usage. Thus, WYSIWYM is well suited to integrate contributors with limited technological knowledge into VGI processes and enables crowdsourcing geographic information at a local level.