PRECIOS DE CADA UNA DE LAS PRESENTACIONES ACTUALES Y POTENCIALES

The social aspects of VGI projects deal with measures that facilitate active participation, motivation, retention of volunteers and conflict resolution measures. Furthermore, they are concerned with outlining guidelines and procedures in which volunteers can contribute land information with ease, and encourage revisits and improve volunteer experience. Figure 7-1 outlines the main social aspects of VGI which can affect its consideration and application for land administration in official systems. The social aspects stress that understanding the characteristics and behaviour of volunteers is essential to the use of VGI for authoritative purposes. For example, understanding volunteer characteristics and behaviours can help organisations develop participatory applications that focus on meeting their needs: if volunteers believe that the application can improve current land administration processes, this can motivate them to contribute accurate and reliable datasets.

The initial data collection study (phase 1) revealed some user characteristics that include a) eagerness to support and participate in initiatives that aim to improve current conditions regarding land administration in their jurisdiction, b) their loyalty and devotion to local leaders who act as gatekeepers to activities taking place in their community, c) tolerance and patience when interacting with the VGI application, and d) fairness and cooperation in assessing contributions made by their peers. These characteristics are very important for VGI since the overall initiative is dependent on user buy-in, acceptance, optimism, and determination. Furthermore, they indicate that the public is eager to become active stakeholders in an initiative

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that promises to address challenges related to land in their area neglected by the Land Authority in the past.

Figure 7-1. The social aspects of VGI in land administration.

Volunteer engagement strategies: A well-defined strategy defining how participants can be

engaged in a participatory initiative increases the likelihood of volunteer contributions and the production of reliable datasets about land use, occupancy and cultural heritage sites. Moreover, it is crucial to devise approaches that can promote the initiative and outline its potential benefits towards improving land related issues in the society. For example, the VGI initiative can provide a platform where issues like illegal sand mining, litter dumping and other land mismanagement activities occurring in the community can be reported and acted on by the Land Board. Once engaged, however, volunteers can participate as contributors, assessors, gatekeepers, updaters, editors or reporters of activities taking place in their local community.

Volunteer motivation and retention: Motivations of volunteers vary greatly depending on the

nature of the project. For example, volunteers may be driven by altruism or a desire to improve the land administration and cadastral processes of their local area. Some volunteers may have targeted reasons such as the desire to speed up and reduce the costs of official processes. Other motivational factors include social enhancement, career advancements, understanding, self- promotion, personal satisfaction (Tulloch, 2008; Basiouka et al., 2015), financial rewards and reciprocity (Budhathoki, 2010), the pride of place, and protection of personal investments. For example, it was reported in (UN-Habitat, 2012) that slum dwellers in Uganda acknowledged the significance of STDM in addressing their information requirements: the information was successfully used by the slum dwellers to influence policy and development by advocating for their needs to the Ugandan government. Publishing and acting on volunteer contributions in a

Social Aspects of VGI

- incentives to contribute quality data - user retention mechanisms Motivation and retention - educational qualifications - age - gender - occupation - experience - activity space Volunteer profiles - conflict resolution measures - consensus establishment Conflict resolution - tutorials (videos or documented contribution steps) Contribution guidelines - contributor - assessor - gate keeper - updater - editor - reporter Volunteer engagement

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timely manner is a major retention factor that encourages participation in future activities (Johnson and Sieber, 2013).

In this instance, participants were motivated by the desire to have a system that engages them as stakeholders in the administration of their land rights through VGI to improve their awareness in land and its related activities of the local area. Moreover, they were motivated by the optimism that VGI could improve current slow and expensive processes at Land Boards, where many opportunities were lost because of such shortcomings.

Volunteer profiles: Collecting volunteer profile information in a participatory initiative can

help establish their credibility and reputation, such that the quality of their contributions can later be established and relied upon. Volunteers with experience in handling spatial information, either from their educational qualification or occupation, are more likely to produce better quality information than those without. The information can also help administrators keep track of volunteer contributions for data provenance checks, and reduce abuse of the initiative. For example, during the mapping of Kibera slum in Kenya, volunteers with persistent and consistent contributions were elevated to trusted intermediary status and awarded leader positions in their mapping groups (Panek and Sobotova, 2015). The main challenge is that collecting such personal details from volunteers may discourage potential participants who prefer to contribute anonymously (Flanagin and Metzger, 2008).

In this study, volunteer profiles were collected with the objective of determining the credibility of volunteers and establishing quality trends with regards to their contributions. For example, it was discovered that volunteers with prior experience in dealing with land related matters (mostly land parcel owners) correctly identified a high proportion of land parcel occupancies (87%) and land parcel uses (79%). In contrast, volunteer contributors with no or less experience in land related matters (mostly tenants and aspiring landowners) correctly identified the parameters of interest, land parcel occupancy and land use in low proportions, of 45% and 40% respectively. Therefore, trust and confidence can be placed against contributions from volunteers with more experience in dealing with land related matters, compared to those with little experience.

Conflict resolution: VGI may involve many volunteers contributing spatial information to an

initiative. Consequently, there are likely to be conflicting datasets where consensus or synthesis must be agreed upon, involving some datasets taking preference over the other. VGI can involve the handling and representation of multiple views, so there must be well-defined means of

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determining how conflicting datasets, analyses and interpretations can be solved in the initiative. Customary conflict resolution measures can be employed to resolve misunderstandings between volunteers, since they encourage dialogue to seek consensus, negotiate tradeoffs and are credited with high legitimacy (Smith, 2003). For example, traditional conflict resolution measures bring consensus to a problem by involving all parties involved and stakeholders to establish a shared understanding between contrasting volunteer contributions.

In this study, whenever conflicting datasets were received, as in the example of land parcel occupancies described either by a trading name, owner or the most common previous name, consensus-based conflict resolution measures were employed. This strategy involved further consultation with community members for adjudication and consensus building. Eventually, the name with a majority vote was adopted as the final land parcel label of the entity of interest.

Contribution guidelines: To ensure that volunteers contribute quality and reliable datasets,

there should be appropriate documentation and guidelines of how they can interact effectively with the initiative. Proper documentation can further improve the usability of the initiative, facilitate the production of reliable land information and promote buy-in from all stakeholders.

The VGI initiative depends on the active participation of volunteers, hence there should be well- defined strategies of how they can be engaged, motivated, and retained for it to be sustainable. Understanding volunteer characteristics is important as research (Budhathoki, 2010) has shown that data quality can be inferred from the experience that volunteers have in handling spatial data. Conflicting datasets are anticipated in the initiative, from the variety of volunteers many of whom are non-experts in handling geographic information: measures of addressing conflict in volunteer contributions should be put in place. To improve the confidence of participants interacting with the application and increase the likelihood of producing accurate and reliable datasets, it was ensured that demonstrations of system use (Figure 5-7) were a two-way dialogue procedure between the researcher and participant. The usability evaluation measure conducted in the case study further strengthened the technical, usability and overall interactivity of the VGI application used in the implementation stage (Section 5.1) to produce reliable datasets as evidenced by the TRM methodology.

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