Abstract
This paper presents one emerging social-technical innovation: The evolution of citizen-sensor-networks
where citizens organize themselves from the ‘bottom up’, for the sake of confronting governance officials
with measured information about environmental qualities. We have observed how citizen-sensornetworks
have been initiated in the Netherlands in cases where official government monitoring and
business organizations leave gaps. The formed citizen-sensor-networks collect information about issues
that affect the local community in their quality-of-living. In particular, two community initiatives are
described where the sensed environmental information, on noise pollution and gas-extraction induced
earthquakes respectively, is published through networked geographic information methods. Both
community initiatives pioneered in developing an approach that comprises the combined setting-up of
sensor data flows, real-time map portals and community organization. Two particular cases are analyzed
to trace the emergence and network operation of such ‘networked geo-information tools’ in practice: (1)
The Groningen earthquake monitor, and (2) The Airplane Monitor Schiphol. In both cases, environmental
'externalities' of spatial-economic activities play an important role, having economic dimensions of
national importance (e.g. gas extraction and national airport development) while simultaneously
affecting the regional community with environmental consequences.
The monitoring systems analyzed in this paper are established bottom-up, by citizens for citizens, to
serve as ‘information power’ in dialogue with government institutions. The goal of this paper is to gain
insight in how these citizen-sensor-networks come about: how the idea for establishing a sensor
network originated, how their value gets recognized and adopted in the overall ‘system of governance’;
to what extent they bring countervailing power against vested interests and established discourses to the
table and influence power-laden conflicts over environmental pressures; and whether or not they
achieve (some form of) institutionalization and, ultimately, policy change.
We find that the studied-citizen-sensor networks gain strength by uniting efforts and activities in
crowdsourcing data, providing factual, ‘objectivized data’ or ‘evidence’ of the situation ‘on the ground’ on
a matter of local community-wide concern. By filling an information need of the local community, a
process of ‘collective sense-making’ combined with citizen empowerment could grow, which influenced
societal discourse and challenged prevailing truth-claims of public institutions. In both cases similar,
‘competing’ web-portals were developed in response, both by the gas-extraction company and the
airport. But with the citizen-sensor-networks alongside, we conclude there is a shift in power balance
involved between government and affected communities, as the government no longer has information
monopoly on environmental measurements.
