skip to main content
research-article
Public Access

Quotidian Report: Grassroots Data Practices to Address Public Safety

Published:01 November 2018Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

We examine the local data practices of citizens in Mexico who use Facebook sites as a platform to report crimes and share safety-related information. We conducted 14 interviews with a variety of participants who collaborate as administrators and contributors of these online communities. The communities we examined have two central components: the citizens who crowd-source data about instances of crime in different neighborhoods in and around Mexico City, and the administrators of the Facebook sites who use the crowd-sourced data to intervene and collaborate with other stakeholders. From our interviews, we identify the community, data, and action practices used by group administrators to collect, curate, and publish information about public safety that would otherwise go unreported. The combination of these practices improves the reputation of the groups on Facebook, increases trust, and encourages sustained participation from citizens. These practices also legitimize data gathered by group members as an important grassroots tool for responding to issues of public safety that would otherwise not be reported or acted upon. Our findings contribute a growing body of work that aims to understand how social media enable political action in contexts where people are not being served by existing institutions.

References

  1. Azam Ahmed. 2017. Using Billions in Government Cash, Mexico Controls News Media. The New York Times. Re-trieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/25/world/americas/mexico-press-government-advertising.htmlGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Adriana Alvarado Garcia, Alyson L. Young, and Lynn Dombrowski. 2017. On Making Data Actionable: How Activ-ists Use Imperfect Data to Foster Social Change for Human Rights Violations in Mexico. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, CSCW: 1--19. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. E. Ambinder, D.M. Jennings, I. Blachman-Biatch, K Edgemon, P. Hull, and A. Taylor. 2013. The Resilient Social Network.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. Ernesto Aroche Aguilar. 2017. Gobierno de EPN gasta 1 mdp por hora en propaganda; rebasa 71% lo que le aprobó el Congreso. Animal Político. Retrieved from https://www.animalpolitico.com/2017/09/publicidad-gobierno-epn-gasto/Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. Mariam Asad and Christopher Le Dantec. 2015. Illegitimate Civic Participation: Supporting Community Activists on the Ground. 1694--1703. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. Mariam Asad, Christopher A. Le Dantec, Becky Nielsen, and Kate Diedrick. 2017. Creating a Sociotechnical API: Designing City-Scale Community Engagement. 2295--2306. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. Anne Bowser, Derek Hansen, Yurong He, Carol Boston, Matthew Reid, Logan Gunnell, and Jennifer Preece. 2013. Using gamification to inspire new citizen science volunteers. In Proceedings of the first international conference on gameful design, research, and applications, 18--25. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Caren Cooper, Janis Dickinson, Tina Phillips, and Rick Bonney. 2007. Citizen Science as a Tool for Conservation in Residential Ecosystems. Ecology and Society 12, 2.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  9. Eric Corbett and Christopher Le Dantec. 2018. Going the Distance: Trust Work in Citizen Participation.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. Jesús Eduardo Coronado Escobar and Angela Rocio Vasquez Urriago. 2014. Gamification: an effective mechanism to promote civic engagement and generate trust? 514--515. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. Clara Crivellaro, Rob Comber, John Bowers, Peter C. Wright, and Patrick Olivier. 2014. A pool of dreams: facebook, politics and the emergence of a social movement. 3573--3582. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. David Hakken. 2003. The Knowledge Landscapes of Cyberspace. Routledge Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. Munmun De Choudhury, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and Gloria Mark. 2014. "Narco" emotions: affect and desensi-tization in social media during the mexican drug war. 3563--3572. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Janis L. Dickinson, Benjamin Zuckerberg, and David N. Bonter. 2010. Citizen Science as an Ecological Research Tool: Challenges and Benefits. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 41, 1: 149--172.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  15. Carl DiSalvo, Jonathan Lukens, Thomas Lodato, Tom Jenkins, and Tanyoung Kim. 2014. Making public things: how HCI design can express matters of concern. 2397--2406. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  16. Steven M. Ellis. 2017. Mexico most deadly country for journalists in 2017. International Press Institute. Retrieved March 5, 2018 from https://ipi.media/mexico-most-deadly-country-for-journalists-in-2017/Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Shelly Farnham, David Keyes, Vicky Yuki, and Chris Tugwell. 2012. Puget sound off: fostering youth civic engage-ment through citizen journalism. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 285--294. Retrieved April 25, 2017 from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2145251 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Sarah Fox, Rachel Rose Ulgado, and Daniela Rosner. 2015. Hacking Culture, Not Devices: Access and Recognition in Feminist Hackerspaces. 56--68. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. Lisa Gitelman. 2013. Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron. The MIT Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. Mike Harding, Bran Knowles, Nigel Davies, and Mark Rouncefield. 2015. HCI, Civic Engagement & Trust. 2833--2842. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. Richard H. R. Harper. 2000. The organisation in ethnography--a discussion of ethnographic fieldwork programs in CSCW. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 9, 2: 239--264. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. Yurong He, Jennifer E. Preece, Jennifer Hammock, Michele Weber, Seabird McKeon, and Andrea Wiggins. 2016. A Journey of Citizen Science Data in an Online Environment. 289--292. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. Ilkka Tuomi. 1999. Data Is More than Knowledge: Implications of the Reversed Knowledge Hierarchy for Knowledge Management and Organizational Memory. Journal of Management Information Systems 16, 3: 103--117. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  24. Carrie Kahn. 2017. Number Of Journalists Killed In Mexico Reaches "Historical High," Report Says. National Public Radio (NPR). Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/22/572822696/number-of-journalists-killed-in-mexico-reaches-historical-high-report-saysGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  25. Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel. 2018. Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica Harvested Data of Up to 87 Million Users. The New York Times. Retrieved April 4, 2018 from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/mark-zuckerberg-testify-congress.htmlGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  26. Sunyoung Kim, Jennifer Mankoff, and Eric Paulos. 2013. Sensr: evaluating a flexible framework for authoring mobile data-collection tools for citizen science. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, 1453--1462. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. Stacey Kuznetsov. 2013. Expanding our visions of citizen science. interactions 20, 4: 26--31. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  28. Stacey Kuznetsov, Alex S. Taylor, Tim Regan, Nicolas Villar, and Eric Paulos. 2012. At the seams: DIYbio and op-portunities for HCI. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 258--267. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  29. Christopher A. Le Dantec. 2016. Designing Publics. The MIT Press. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  30. Christopher A. Le Dantec, Caroline Appleton, Mariam Asad, Robert Rosenberger, and Kari Watkins. 2016. Advocat-ing Through Data: Community Visibility Through Crowdsourced Cycling Data. In Bicycle Justice and Urban Trans-formation Biking for All. Routledge Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  31. Christopher A. Le Dantec, Mariam Asad, Aditi Misra, and Kari E. Watkins. 2015. Planning with Crowdsourced Data: Rhetoric and Representation in Transportation Planning. 1717--1727. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  32. Christopher A. Le Dantec and Sarah Fox. 2015. Strangers at the Gate: Gaining Access, Building Rapport, and Co-Constructing Community-Based Research. 1348--1358. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  33. Sheena Lewis and Dan A. Lewis. 2012. Examining technology that supports community policing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1371--1380. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  34. Silvia Lindtner. 2011. Multi-Sited Design D.I.Y., Shanzhai and Internet Counterculture in Shanghai, China.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  35. Jessa Lingel. 2017. Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community. MIT Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  36. Elaine Massung, David Coyle, Kirsten F. Cater, Marc Jay, and Chris Preist. 2013. Using crowdsourcing to support pro-environmental community activism. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 371--380. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  37. Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman. 1994. Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook. SAGE Publications, Inc.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  38. Michael J. Muller and Sandra Kogan. 2012. Grounded Theory Method in HCI and CSCW. In Human Computer In-teraction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications. CRC Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  39. Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Shelly Farnham, Emre Kiciman, Scott Counts, and Munmun De Choudhury. 2013. Smart societies: from citizens as sensors to collective action. interactions 20, 4: 16--19. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  40. David Mora. 2015. El gasto histórico de Peña en publicidad oficial. Animal Político. Retrieved from https://www.animalpolitico.com/blogueros-altoparlante/2015/07/13/el-gasto-historico-de-pena-en-publicidad-oficial/Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  41. Nataly Moreno, Saiph Savage, Anamary Leal, Jessica Cornick, Matthew Turk, and Tobias Höllerer. 2015. Motivating Crowds to Volunteer Neighborhood Data. 235--238. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  42. Patrick Olivier and Peter Wright. 2015. Digital civics: taking a local turn. interactions 22, 4: 61--63. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  43. Gwen Ottinger. 2010. Buckets of Resistance: Standards and the Effectiveness of Citizen Science. Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, 2: 244--270.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  44. Leysia Palen and Kenneth M. Anderson. 2016. Crisis informatics-New data for extraordinary times. Science 353, 6296: 224--225.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  45. Daniela K. Rosner, Silvia Lindtner, Ingrid Erickson, Laura Forlano, Steven J. Jackson, and Beth Kolko. 2014. Making cultures: building things & building communities. 113--116. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  46. Dana Rotman, Jen Hammock, Jenny J. Preece, Carol L. Boston, Derek L. Hansen, Anne Bowser, and Yurong He. 2014. Does motivation in citizen science change with time and culture? 229--232. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  47. Niharika Sachdeva and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru. 2014. Online Social Media and Police in India: Behavior, Percep-tions, Challenges. arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.2042.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  48. Servicio de Administracion Tributaria (SAT). 2017. Salarios Minimos 2018. Retrieved March 5, 2018 from http://www.sat.gob.mx/informacion_fiscal/tablas_indicadores/paginas/salarios_minimos.aspxGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  49. Katie Shilton. 2010. Participatory sensing: Building empowering surveillance. Surveillance & Society 8, 2: 131--150.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  50. Robert Soden and Leysia Palen. 2014. From Crowdsourced Mapping to Community Mapping: The Post-earthquake Work of OpenStreetMap Haiti. In COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 27--30 May 2014, Nice (France), Chiara Rossitto, Luigina Ciolfi, David Martin and Bernard Conein (eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 311--326.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  51. Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen. 2010. Pass it on?: Retweeting in mass emergency. International Community on In-formation Systems for Crisis Response and Management.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  52. Zeynep Tufekci. 2017. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Yale University Press. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  53. Sarah Vieweg, Amanda L. Hughes, Kate Starbird, and Leysia Palen. 2010. Microblogging during two natural hazards events: what twitter may contribute to situational awareness. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human fac-tors in computing systems, 1079--1088. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  54. 2016. Atrocidades innegables: Confrontando crímenes de lesa humanidad en México. Open Society Foundations. Retrieved October 21, 2016 from https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/undeniable-atrocities-esp-2nd-edition.pdfGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  55. 2016. Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción sobre Seguridad Pública (ENVIPE) 2016. Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI). Retrieved from http://www.beta.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/proyectos/enchogares/regulares/envipe/2016/doc/presentacion.pdfGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  56. 2017. Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción sobre Seguridad Pública (ENVIPE) 2017. Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI). Retrieved from http://www.inegi.org.mx/saladeprensa/boletines/2017/envipe/envipe2017_09.pdfGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  57. 2017. Iraq, Syria deadliest countries for journalists. Committee to Protect Journalists. Retrieved from https://cpj.org/2017/12/iraq-syria-deadliest-countries-for-journalists.phpGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. Quotidian Report: Grassroots Data Practices to Address Public Safety

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Login options

      Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

      Sign in

      Full Access

      PDF Format

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader
      About Cookies On This Site

      We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

      Learn more

      Got it!