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Building resilient societies that use land sustainably requires understanding land use, and understanding land use requires, fundamentally, land user-generated information and collective land use knowledge. However, in the Digital Earth era, big data from space contrasts with the big gap of data from the ground. Land use maps are not made by those who use the land, and the promised democratization of geographic information use and production which enables the participation of land users in local and global land use planning decision-making processes is not a reality, especially in rural areas in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) where the digital divide endures but the number of emergent users is increasing steadily.
This thesis reports on interdisciplinary research that explores how inequality in participation in geographic information production and use can be reduced, and draws knowledge from Geospatial and Information and Communication Technology for Development (Geo-ICT4D), Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D), Participatory Land Administration, Citizen Science and Geographic Information Science (GIScience) in general, and Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in particular.
Looking at human-human, human-land and human-computer (mobile) interactions, and following human-centered design principles, wisdom of the crowd concepts, usability engineering methods and participatory action research, participatory software design and participatory mapping approaches, the socio-technical innovation for land use messaging & mapping by land users has been co-designed with farming, pastoralist, agro-pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities and other stakeholders in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya and Namibia.
The GPS and satellite imagery-based on-site and off-site mapping app developed as part of this research brings mapping to where land users interact in the cultural dimension (locally relevant pictorial interfaces and captions), physical dimension (in-field, community gatherings, home), and digital dimension (mobile instant messaging).
The results from the case studies in South West Nigeria and Ethiopia build on the fieldwork in Kenya and Namibia and show that, by linking messaging (WhatsApp) & mapping, private community mapping can potentially grow organically, and open community mapping and inclusive data-driven collaborations do follow if both the land users’ needs and the (land user-generated) data users’ needs are considered. The results from the case study in Ethiopia demonstrate that land user-generated maps can be more complete (spatially and semantically), locally relevant and actionable than user-generated maps (e.g. OpenStreetMap – the Wikipedia of maps) and machine-generated maps (e.g. Google & WRI’s Dynamic World map).
This research contributes to bridging the land user-generated data gap to build more inclusive and intelligent planetary-scale monitoring systems that combine collective intelligence and artificial intelligence. Future work will explore responsible ways to popularise and monetize land user-generated content (LUGC) and the wisdom of the crowd, aiming that within the digital Earth economy, the land users are remunerated for bridging the ground data gap and for their crucial contribution to sustainability.