IoT Community Technologies: Leaving Users to Their Own Devices or Orchestration of Engagement?

Abstract

Citizens are increasingly crowdfunding IoT based participatory sensing technologies that allow them to collect and sharedata about the environment. These initiatives are usually referred to as grassroots and are driven by a vision of wideningaccess to tools for political action. In this paper we compare patterns of participation and user experience over 15 monthsin two distinct communities using ‘Smart Citizen’, a crowdfunded IoT participatory sensing tool. Our studies reveal thattechnology issues and a lack of reliability of the sensed data hindered user participation. However, in one of thecommunities, many of these challenges were overcome through orchestrated actions led by community champions. Wediscuss how crowdfunding doesn’t necessarily translate into active participation and provide guidelines on how to achievesustained engagement in crowdfunded IoT community sensing projects: enable distributed orchestration provided by localchampions, encourage social interactions that embed skills and learning, and facilitate meaningful participation and rewardmechanisms among community members.

Keywords

• IoT community technologies
• engagement
• crowdfunding
• social action
• activism
• participatory sensing