FLAMENCO

Project Description

There is a high societal demand for citizen observatories but the development of such observatories is labour-intensive, lengthy and requiring of technical expertise.

A partnership of five academic partners lead by the Software Languages Lab (SOFT), share the insight that there is on the one hand a high societal demand for citizen observatories, and on the other that the developments of such observatories is labour-intensive, lengthy and requiring of technical expertise. This led us to the idea of building and deploying an end-user reconfigurable citizen observatory platform for Flanders. Through this platform, stakeholders can set up their own citizen observatory targeting a variety of parameters: sensorial parameters (noise, air quality, humidity, …) or behavioural parameters (the flux of people in a public transport system, the tolerance of people w.r.t. traffic delays, contextual assessment such as “I’m sitting on an empty bus”, “I feel unsafe here”, . . . ). The FLAMENCO platform shall integrate tools, techniques and socio-economic insights that allow stakeholders to work around the central notion of a campaign.

The objective of FLAMENCO is to create an open cloud-based software platform designed to allow citizens to create and participate in citizen observatory campaigns.

The main objective of the 4-year Flamenco project is to create an open cloud-based software platform specifically designed for allowing citizens to create and participate in so-called citizen observatory campaigns. A campaign is defined by stakeholders by specifying what data needs to be collected in order to map and indicate some concern (A in the figure above). Subsequently, the campaign is enacted through the stakeholder’s citizen observatory (B in the figure above), which also monitors campaign progress in terms of incoming data, and orchestrates activities in case progress is not as expected.

Finally, the campaign is analysed by producing the requested output (maps, reports)(C in the figure below). Despite the fact that campaigns constitute a fairly obvious notion, there currently exists only limited support for them. In this project they are essential in bridging the gap between stakeholder usability, data quality, and the well-known intricacies of engineering reconfigurable software.