Estadificación de los STB

As people started to join the campaign, it was valuable to see what motivated these early adopters of technology and supporters of the AQE project. Data on this subject was collected by the campaign's organisers. The response to a question about why and what motivated them to support the AQE project was collected in one spreadsheet. The 103 backers volunteered their responses, mostly in the form of one or two sentences. My analysis of these 103 responses identified three major themes.

While the majority of Kickstarter campaign supporters, like its core developers team, were often technologically-aware enthusiasts interested in social technology, there were also many who were driven by a common concern for the planet, or for their own welfare, and who were looking for technology that could support their struggles.

The first category would be the already mentioned technologists involved with the development of social technologies, as these examples illustrate:

E16: I'm a London-based UX designer who is interested in using pervasive technology to help improve people's lives. This seems like a very interesting experiment.

E17: I am a semi-retired instrumentation technician living in the high desert of N.M. I have a Pachube feed now just for hobby purposes. Interest in air quality is a just concern with keeping the planet liveable. I would be interested in setting up one of your

"eggs".

As comments indicate, the project's hands-on, experimental, open and DIY approach, seemed to appeal to skilled people who saw an opportunity for their skills to be applied, even in retirement or in their free time. It is worth noting that some of these supporters, exemplified in E17, indicated their knowledge or use of the Pachube platform, further suggesting ties with a broader DIY and open hardware community.

Likewise, the project was attractive to technologists and activists involved in some already existing communities or education projects, as illustrated by the following:

E18: I am an architecture student working for a non-profit community design center called building community WORKSHOP.

I am leading an energy education initiative, and we are working on a plan to implement home energy metering and feedback at a community scale. I think air-quality goes hand in hand with efficient energy use and “healthy neighbourhoods”. We are working on solutions to bring forward the benefits of sensor technology in making educated behavioural choices related to building energy performance in low-income communities (with limited access to these technologies).

Example 18, however, can also be seen as one that exhibit several motivations as it blurs the backers own technological know-how with that of education initiative that is concerned with helping a low-income communities to make educated behavioural choices. The latter, while resonating the general IoT discourse also highlights the second theme that emerged across the motivation sample. The second theme involved day-to-day activists who in general are interested in the common good, the health of common resources, and in activism as such. While expressing global concerns, supporters in this group were more often concerned with local issues.

Examples can be drawn from comments such as:

E19: Hi, I live in London England and always wonder just what I'm breathing in, in this unnatural world we live in!

E20: I want to know what kind of air quality we have here in Valparaiso, IN, with Chicago being just upstream from us and all.

E21: Hey - I live in Atlanta, GA - Would like to monitor air quality.

E22: I am interested in the 'activist' angle - data that compliments or supersedes that provided by established power structures.

The third theme that emerged encompassed people with existing health problems who were looking for the tools to explore their own environments and thus to tackle or self-manage concerns driven by their own or their family's health.

E23: Hi, my interest is in the levels of pollen, mold and humidity as I am asthmatic.

E24: I am in Switzerland and they smoke so much here, they also use a lot of chemicals, from paint to the oils for heating... I am sure this has affected my breathing these last years.

E25: My children have developed asthma symptoms, and I would like to know how the air quality is to see what correlation can be inferred from the data.

E26: My family lives several miles from the Rhode Island Central Landfill, which was never an issue until around September of this year, when foul gas odours began emanating from the landfill and spreading far beyond the landfill's boundaries. Sometimes the smell is so pronounced and gag-worthy as to induce headaches and nausea. I have a hard time believing that a gas so noxious could possibly be benign, and I'd love to contribute in any way to help measure and map air quality in our community. Plus, I'm a geek and just love the idea of a connected device like this.

As these examples corroborate, the growing community involved in supporting this project were situated predominantly in Europe and America. Furthermore, it seemed to engage citizens in both urban and rural settings, interested in both indoor and outdoor air monitoring. Some of them had some other group affiliations, some did not. While these are comments are from only a few members, they illustrate well the three general themes, as well as how often overlapping their interests and motivations were. The Example 26 is another good example that illustrates these overlapping motivations of people who on the one hand have some technical knowledge, and on the other hand have a particular concern. In this particular example the motivation is stimulated both by an activist concern, living next to a landfill and by his personal health concern – the experience of headaches and nausea.

These three broad categories and the same underlying concerns echo across the community discussions I have observed on and offline, before and after this campaign.

This would suggest that many who joined the AQE Kickstarter campaign not only felt connected with the community's ideals and proposed objectives, but also exhibit alignment with the initial community in terms of the three key motivation frameworks, their communicative competence, and the use of the rhetorical framing of IoT and citizen science contexts. For example, Example 18 touches upon the idea of behavioural change that such sensing technologies could encourage. The idea of behavioural change echoes across many other conversations I have observed, as well as in the broader IoT context. This not only suggests the participants' perception of

the technocratic and social framing of the IoT debate, but also how energy efficiency and similar issues of sustainability are located within the framework of the citizen science network. Example 22 similarly highlights an issue of concern that can be found in our study, both in terms of the original group of AQE advocates and the extended AQE network, that of power relations. As noted already, by drawing parallels with established data sources, or criticising the shortcomings of existing air quality measurement stations or their network density, there seems to be a common distrust of 'official' data. Such a position is often employed, in both identification and motivation framings, by this, now extended, community of AQE network participants.

Furthermore, like the original developer's team, this now extended AQE network was made up of geographicaly-distributed participants. Analysts of Kickstarter campaigns (Agrawal et al., 2011; Mollick, 2013) have noted that there is an observable geographic component to campaigns. While this study did not have access to the time data of each pledge, the ethnographic data suggest that there might be a correlation between the number of supporters and the origin of a campaign. On Aug 10, 2012, Simone Cortesi, a biogeographer and an OpenStreetMap Italy founder, mapped out the locations of Kickstarter backers, illustrating the locations where the eggs would be despatched.

8. Screenshot of the Kickstarter backers map by Simone Cortesi (August 10, 2012)¹⁸⁸

The largest supporter base of 461 backers was in the USA and Canada, followed by 180 backers in Europe. The map also shows how wide the appeal of the project has

188See original here: http://shop.wickeddevice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/CortesiMAp.jpg

been as it has reached places such as New Zealand, Australia, Korea, Taiwan, Georgia, Estonia, Island, Israel, Brazil, Hawaii, to name a few. However, the map only covers 714 backers instead of the total of 927 pledgers¹⁸⁹. From the data of this map and the observations conducted on conversations in other online spaces, it appears that it was not so much the geographic nearness but rather mental ties and community associations that motivated backers. To further the Agrawal et al. (2011) suggestion, I would argue that the large number of USA supporters could also be explained by the fact that the Kickstarter platform itself is USA based, requiring backers to pledge in dollars, a factor that could possibly prevent a broader international appeal.