Uploaded on 2016-11-16 by Sociocognitive

Traffic management ------------------ A crowdsourcing project would be about traffic management in the city. We can imagine a platform that centralizes data and information gathered by many citizens about the traffic conditions of a city. This may feed existing traffic management systems (controllers) or inform future developments and design within the city. Citizens may send information using their mobile phones or through a regular internet connection. Information could be structured (for example, selection from a list of items, such as "Low"/"Medium"/"Heavy" traffic) or unstructured (free text, that we expect to be short and use keywords). The citizens could also report accidents and other abnormalities, such as smoke, crowding etc. Data gathering may also happen automatically, for example through continuous tracking of a user's mobile phone location (it would be reasonable to assume that some users would have the choice to turn on this particular feature while traveling to work). All this data and information may be processed centrally but it should also be publicly available in some form. Public availability is compulsory, on the one hand because the producers of the data (the citizens) should be entitled to access them and on the other hand because many issues may be raised and many solutions identified and proposed by the citizens that are interested in and concerned about certain situations. Often times, the administrative or urban design team may not come up with an adequate understanding of a situation and/or a good solution, while crowd- sourced bottom-up discussions may be illuminating and provide innovative views and solutions (for example, to make a certain street a one-way street). Paris is notorious for its traffic conditions despite the heavy flow in public transportation means. Especially in strike days, the situation is unmanageable. Therefore, I believe that such a citizen design science system would be beneficial for the city. -----