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PEER COLLECTED OPEN DATA
D by Kari A Hintikka
Data Volunteers
Open data from the public sector has increased rapidly in many countries, with many governments actively opening their data sets. An area of digital open data which has not received so much attention yet is citizen-collected open data. The phenomenon has not even been defined properly yet. For example, one can talk about ‘people-created’, ‘peerbased’, ‘an individual’s’ open data or ‘open peer data’. But the basic idea is quite clear: with mobile and other devices, ordinary people can easily measure, collect, organise, share and analyse data on the Internet. In the past these tasks had been reserved and restricted to qualified professionals with expensive equipment. An example is OpenStreetMap.org, a global mapping service— like Google Maps—put together by thousands of volunteers. Ushahidi. com is a non-profit software company that offers easy mapping and crowdsourcing tools, like CrowdMap, which can be used to get a real-time perception and crowdsourced data collection about incidents in crisis areas, like in Haiti or civil wars in Africa. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, people quickly started to create Internet services to announce where evacuated citizens were and what condition their houses were in, etc. In this article I first introduce a case of citizen-based real-time collected radiation data after the tsunami and the meltdown of the nuclear plant in Fukushima in 2011. Then I study some possible consequences and examples from Finland as to what might happen when ordinary people get the same data resources as had previously been restricted to qualified experts only. And finally, I introduce one case, global H1Ni pandemic tracking, where ordinary people around the globe combined their volunteer activities with qualified experts. 21