Title: Democratic issues and opportunities in emergent ubicomp infrastructures – learnings from the urban process
Time: Thursday, October 11, 9:00-10:00 (sharp)
Place: Ada-333
Speaker: Sebastian Weise, Lancaster University
Abstract:
Labels are sometimes useful to engage in current conversations. These days the label “smart” city is often used to describe a city in which data capture and analysis supports urban life (drawing on mobile computing, Internet data, and stationary sensors). This emerging “ubiquitous infrastructure”, seen as the bundle of disjoint ICT systems existing in cities today, has fundamental implications for the transparency of society in the future. Taking this infrastructural view of digital information networks existing in urban environments today, I will discuss the requirements for democracy in distributed sensing applications in urban environments. Drawing on the urban process and current technological trends, I develop ideas on local data management and “community data stores”. I will in particular highlight opportunities to ‘localize’ data management in a future sensing infrastructure by looking at the communities that are already involved in urban change “on the ground” and discuss in more detail the current trends and potentials for data stores and open data, their potential to institutionalize data management on a local level in the context of participation in urban planning choices. This talk will unpick the future of the “smart city” and highlight some of the important choices in technological development in enabling transparency and participation in a digital data-based society.
Bio:
Sebastian Weise is a PhD student and researcher at the Doctoral Centre for Digital Innovation at Lancaster University in the UK. He uses a post-disciplinary approach that crosses management, design, and computer science to study the potential for citizen engagement in urban planning choices. His particular focus is the potential of geo-centric ICT applications (i.e. of relevance to a particular geographical area), such as emergent urban data stores. His views of future data infrastructures for cities were expressed in his recent talk at Ubicomp 2012, where it was well received and stimulated debate.
– Email: s.weise@lancaster.ac.uk
– Researcher profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sebastian_Weise/
Host: Matthias Korn, Participatory IT Centre