by Seán Ó Loingsigh, founder and geographer, LitterWeek.org
Today, more than six billion people are connected online – with no training in the data collection purpose of technology. We’re all driving Ferraris but there are no seatbelts, no rules of the road, no theory test; we’re all blindfolded on high-speed digital motorways, hoping for the best.
As geographers we use real-world data to map and make sense of the world. It’s why I built OpenLitterMap.com – an open-source UN-recognised Digital Public Good that has crowdsourced over 500,000 observations from 1,000s of people in over 110 countries. I believe that participating in citizen science and using platforms like OpenLitterMap is a better, safer and more purposeful use of technology than social media, which is human-centric and mostly closed-source. Every time you open a social media feed you are looking at the opinions and attention-seeking narratives of others that happened in the past. But when you empower yourself with the production of geographic information, you get to create the future.
Disclaimer: I still use social media — but only to rant and vent about the lack of support for citizen science in Ireland.
Despite a global abundance of always-online data collection technology absorbed by billions of people with no training, Ireland has no pathway to recognise any of this. No smartphone or geospatial strategy. No technology training, plan or direction. Families are left to navigate an increasingly complex digital environment without shared vocabulary or understanding. Young people are often more knowledgeable about these issues than their parents. Every year, another generation learns to use technology independently, without understanding how it uses them collectively.
To overcome this lack of technology training, I have extended OpenLitterMap to LitterWeek– a One-Week Any-Week Digital Skills Training Programme to teach people about the data-collection purpose of technology. After a one-hour training course, participants collect litter data safely, learning how their smartphones capture location, time and information; turning actions into datasets.
At the end of the week, participants create a report and present their findings to their school. We don’t collect any personal, human, contact or any other information – only the anonymised litter data that is reviewed and sent through the school account.
Within 24 hours of launch, LitterWeek secured its first pilot with a small school in rural Ireland that wants to make a big impact. We are looking for 3–5 technology leaders in education who want to run the first few LitterWeeks and help us act on your valuable feedback.
If you want to learn more, get involved or support this initiative in some way, follow me on linkedin.com/in/seanlynchgis.
