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Local ground: a paper-based toolkit for documenting local geo-spatial knowledge

Published: 17 December 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Comprehensive spatial knowledge is vital for making good planning decisions - whether it be for planning infrastructure, public projects or addressing other community needs. Often it is the local residents themselves who have the most current and accurate understanding of the uses and condition of any place. Including diverse voices is difficult in the planning process, as many local groups do not have access to the same technologies as larger institutional actors. To address their needs, we have developed Local Ground: a tool that allows local residents to document their personal knowledge of places using simple bar-coded paper maps, computer vision techniques and free, publicly available mapping and charting tools. Users annotate paper maps using simple pens, markers and stamps. These maps are scanned and aggregated online, where they can be analyzed and overlaid on information obtained from other knowledge sources, allowing local perspectives to influence planning decisions. We tested Local Ground with a group of high school youth involved in an urban revitalization project in a low-income neighborhood in Richmond, California. Students and teachers found our tools to be portable, fun, collaborative, and easy to learn. In this paper we describe the Local Ground toolkit, including its strengths as a geo-spatial data collection and dissemination tool, and some findings obtained from our initial field pilot in Richmond.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ACM DEV '10: Proceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
December 2010
228 pages
ISBN:9781450304733
DOI:10.1145/1926180
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 17 December 2010

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Author Tags

  1. ICTD
  2. internet mapping
  3. paper interfaces
  4. participatory GIS
  5. participatory planning
  6. rural development
  7. urban planning

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