Making Sense: a New Perspective on Participatory Sensing for Bottom-up Environmental Action

Crowdsensing or participatory sensing technologies are becoming increasingly available, allowing citizens to collectively monitor and share data about the environment. Initiatives that harness the potential of these tools are typically promoted by individuals, communities or organisations in a bid to foster bottomup citizen participation in environmental action. However, our studies around diverse communities who used low-cost open source sensing technologies such as Smart Citizen have revealed a number of challenges that hinder the uptake and sustainability of crowdsensing practices at the grassroots level. In this paper we summarise and discuss these findings and present Making Sense, a H2020 funded project aimed to overcome some of the challenges associated to the scalability and sustainability of environmental participatory sensing.