On the 5th day of our Community Christmas, we are celebrating working in Easterhouse!

Pidgin Perfect were commissioned by Future City Glasgow to deliver a wide ranging digital literacy engagement programme, over June - September 2014, exploring the city through the eyes of enterprises, communities, and individuals. The Future Maps programme complements the Future City Data Team’s stakeholder engagement strategy to encourage more organisations, businesses and public services to open their data.

Future Maps was a a people-focused project. We worked closely with communities, organisations and individuals across the city. We invited people to map Glasgow and share their experiences of the city, using both digital and analogue tools. The workshops taught participants a variety of mapping techniques tailored to reflect the themes, locations and needs of each group. Some aspects of the workshops were left more open - allowing groups time to explore and experiment.Digital literacy and engagement was a key output, and building individuals confidence with digital resources has proved to be empowering for many participants and groups.

The programme was organised into a series of initiatives which focussed on themes and locations across the city: Citizen Mapping in the North East, #SocEntMap Glasgow, Young City Mapping, Mapping Parties, Dear Green Network and Heritage Mapping. Pidgin Perfect and Citizen Mappers across the city have uncovered unrecorded information, mapped neighbourhoods, citizen experiences and green networks, and shared this unique data on open source online maps for everyone to use.

Over the course of three months, we worked with 32 organisations, charities, social enterprises, school and community groups. There were 338 citizen mappers in total, engaging with 9 mapping tools over the course of 30 mapping sessions. 

With Future Maps, we collected stories and experiences of communities around Glasgow. We strove to create the people's map of the city, reflective of their use and navigation of Glasgow. 

We take a look back on the project...

Glasgow aims to open a world of accessible city data gathered by everyone. With over 350 datasets, Glasgow is the city in the UK with the most open data.

Currently both organisational data and citizen data are provided by public and private organisations. This can be rich and detailed but it is still not capturing a true representation of the citizens’ experience of the city.

Digital Literacy and an Experimental Approach

Pidgin Perfect were commissioned by Future City Glasgow to deliver a wide ranging digital literacy engagement programme. 

In addition, the Future Maps was very much a people-focused project. We worked closely with communities, organisations and individuals across the city. We invited people to map Glasgow and share their experiences of the city, using both digital and analogue tools. 

We used a wide range of open mapping tools – both analogue and digital in workshop based environments. The engagement boosted individuals confidence with digital resources and the toolkit proved to be empowering for individuals and groups who valued it as a future asset in their personal and perhaps within their own community groups.

The community sessions generated a unique insight into the workings of the city; exploring it through the eyes of a diverse cross section of it's inhabitants. The datasets and map layers were also entirely open source and available to all!

The Future Maps experimental approach - explore, adapt, test, refine, feedback - has allowed us to gauge how effective each digital tool was in undertaking a wide ranging engagement project. 

Initiatives, Themes and Locations

The programme was organised into a series of initiatives which focussed on themes and locations across the city. 

Citizen Mapping

Mapping and digital literacy sessions in the North East.

#SocEntMap Glasgow

A guided, online programme for Social Enterprises, ethical and sustainable businesses to map themselves using existing open tools.

Young City Mapping

Working with schools and youth groups to gather young people’s experience of the city and explore how open data could be used in their communities.

Mapping Parties

Large scale, celebratory public events held to map a particular theme held in collaboration OpenStreetMap Scotland.

Dear Green Network

Mapping Glasgow’s grass roots: greenspaces, growing spaces, wild areas and the connections between them.

Heritage Mapping

Working in collaboration with Dennistoun Community Council to create a walking mobile application. 

The Future of Mapping Engagement

When we worked with online mapping tools, everyone in the room had a chance to learn through doing: citizens made live changes to the open data; the same data that everyone else in the world will see. 

Over the relatively short course of this project, we have witnessed first-hand how mapping has the potential to widen the reach of community workshopping, improve an individual’s digital literacy and technical confidence and create a unique body of lived knowledge which is open to all. 

We tapped into the energetic stream of open source projects which are building around maps and mapping and encourage other organisations to do so. The possibilities of mapping are infinite. 

You can find more information about the project here

In our last posts we’ve talked about user engagement, approaching people on the streets to get their opinion on how to make Glasgow to become a better city. After that, we interviewed both bus and taxi drivers to listen to their views on road repairs services. Now we are coming to the end of our researching phase. So what happens next? After two months of user engagement and research we need to make sense of ideas, personal stories, issues, insights and information gathered. We have to identify main themes, service principles and technology that is currently available or will be available in the future. Finally we want to communicate and cooperate with other companies involved in this project, share insights, generate ideas together, help each other, gain empathy with their perspective and make sure we don’t cover old ground. We have designed an activities framework to structure our future exploration process and decided to invite different people, stakeholders and experts to join us for specific activities. Our idea was to define a module that could be adapted and exported to other similar projects that involve designing for future services in Smart cities. This is still a work in progress, we are testing it as we go and will modify it to make sure it works in the best possible way.

Here is a visualisation of the activities framework:

So far we have covered the first four activities:

1.INSIGHTS SYNTHESIS After going trough our research individually to refresh our memories and get a good global understanding we shared our thoughts in a team discussion, analysed our findings and started mapping the main insights that emerged from our research. 2 & 3.POPIIE SESSIONS Once we distilled our research, we analysed it further. In the POPIIE session we started evaluating Problems, Opportunities, Principles, Insights, Ideas and evidence we already have or need to look for. We also tried to list which topics or stakeholders need to be explored further. In the second POPIIE session we clustered what came out of the first session to define the main themes, then refined Problems, Opportunities, Ideas and Principles.  Here is an image of our POPIIE sessions:

4.FUTURE PERSONAS BUILDING WORKSHOP For this activity we invited along three people from the Future City | Glasgow team, Ann Dhir, Scott Sherwood, Cyril Dyer and Ed Watt from O Street, one of the companies involved in the program, responsible for the creation of City Dashboards. We prepared a selection of eight personas based on real citizens we met in our research phase and explained their backgrounds. Together we chose the ones we thought were the most interesting and useful to develop. We placed them at the beginning of a 20 years timeline and started asking questions. We explored their lives, habits, their relationship with technology and what or who influences them. Then we moved them across the timeline, first 10 years in the future then 20 and repeated the exercise. The activity was very fruitful and left us with two fully built personas that we can use in the next steps of the project. This workshop worked really well and having external participants helped us getting fresh perspectives, explore facets we wouldn’t have thought about, share our working process and get feedback on it. We will now choose other three personas and develop them following the same process. Here are a couple of images from our personas workshop:

Struan's talked a bit about ethnography and our approach to understanding what it's like to see things from other people's perspective.

As part of the road repair work we've been getting a first hand view using gopro cameras from cyclists. There's been some technical playing to capture the right perspective but after our cycle workshop we've been keen to undertake filming of cyclist's commute and interview them post recording by playing back the footage to get responses to the road. We've been attaching the cameras by a chest harness, and will be undertaking some filming on helmets later this month.  The above is a short test.

The filming and post interviews provide an immediate response in terms of citizen's feeling towards pot holes and road conditions, allowing us to delve deeper into the understanding of when and how cyclists could interface with the council in relation to road condition.

Main feedback so far includes that it would be very difficult to 'report' a pot hole in the moment of passing, and that it causes a large amount of frustration at the time. However, after getting to their destination the feeling of anger/annoyance etc is largely reduced, sometimes due to an apathy that nothing will or could be done and that they will not be listened to.

This poses an interesting conumdrum for Glasgow Future cities and how they build a relationship with the people of Glasgow. It's clear, from both our research with cyclists and film ethnography that the existing relationship is a need from citizens, a pull to fix what's wrong. This goes without saying, however through our workshops, the concept of civic cyclists has been voiced, a pay back for citizens who would work closely with the council to maintain and gather data, in this case, regular films of road conditions.

This loose seed of an idea has links to a certain San Francisco based cycle/map application Cyclodeo that was launched this summer, perhaps something we might see role out within the Open Glasgow work.

It's been interesting, as a side note,to wear the cameras, it's unnerved a few drivers and pedestrians as perhaps a form of surveillance, which will be an interesting sub theme for Open Glasgow to consider, something that has been mentioned during our research from Glasgow citizens around security and the term 'open data'.