Smart city projects collect data on urban environments to identify problems, inform policymaking, and boost citizen engagement. Typically, this data is collected by static sensors placed around the city, which is not ideal for spatiotemporal needs of certain sensing applications such as air quality monitoring. Vehicular crowdsensing is an upcoming approach that addresses this problem by utilizing vehicles’ mobility to collect fine-grained city-scale data. Prior work has mainly focused on designing vehicular crowdsensing systems and related components, including incentive schemes, vehicle selection, and application-specific sensing, without understanding the motivations and challenges faced by drivers and passengers, the two key stakeholders of any vehicular crowdsensing solution. Our work aims to fill this gap. To understand drivers’ and passengers’ perspectives, we developed Turn2Earn, a generic vehicular crowdsensing system that incentivizes drivers to take specific routes for data collection. Turn2Earn system was deployed with 13 auto-rickshaw drivers for two weeks in Bangalore, India. Our drivers took 709 trips using Turn2Earn covering 79.2% of the city’s grid cells. Interviews with 13 drivers and 15 passengers revealed innovative information-based strategies adopted by the drivers to convince passengers in taking alternative routes, and passengers’ altruism in supporting the drivers. We uncovered novel insights, including viability of offered routes due to road closure, issues with electric vehicles, and selection bias among the drivers. We conclude with design recommendations to inform the future of vehicular crowdsensing, including engaging and incentivizing passengers, and criticality-based reward structure.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479869
Large-scale data systems play an increasingly central role in how state bureaucracies and citizens come to know and navigate their relationship with each other. Such systems are endemically uneven in implementation, producing distributed and exclusionary consequences that are among their most important effects. These systems also operate as infrastructures in the rich and complex sense of the term that has been a core contribution of CSCW to the wider computing and social science fields. Building on James Scott’s work on ‘seeing like a state’, we conceptualize ‘seeing like an infrastructure’ as a more supple analytic perspective that maps the distributed work and uneven consequences through which designers, bureaucrats, and users (here, citizens) assign or claim representation in the consequential data systems that increasingly shape and define citizenship. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork into Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based identification project, and studies of infrastructure, marginalization, and citizenship in CSCW and allied fields, we argue that this perspective provides crucial insight into the strategies and mechanisms by which effective access to the basic rights and entitlements of citizenship are granted, claimed, and at times undermined. More specifically, we show how challenges in implementing Aadhaar’s three key processes—enrollment, seeding, and authentication—give rise to a spectrum of resolution in which the rights and entitlements of ‘high-resolution citizens’ are expanded, while those of ‘low-resolution citizens’ are curtailed.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3476056
We use a sociotechnical perspective to expand upon prior characterizations of deploying end-to-end urban sensor networks that focus primarily on the technical aspects of such systems. Via exploratory, semi-structured interviews with those deploying a number of urban sensor networks in a single American city, we identify ways that human decision-making and collaborative processes influence how these infrastructures are built. We synthesize into a framework in which sociotechnical factors show up across the phases of data collection, management, analysis, and impacts within smart city projects. Each phase can display variability in immediacy, automation, geographic scope, and ownership. Finally, we use our situated work to discuss a generalizable tension within smart city projects between cross-domain data integration and fragmentation and provide implications for CSCW research, the design of smart city data platforms, and municipal policy.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449252
The convergence of networked digital infrastructures and built environments have given rise to the “urban user”, a conflation of “the user” and “the resident” or “the citizen”. The urban user and the city infrastructures are mutually constituted phenomena formed through the interactions between them. In this research, we contribute an ethnographic study that focuses on the everyday interactions between the urban user and water infrastructures in Pune, India. Using Nikhil Anand’s concept of “hydraulic citizenship” to analyze our ethnographic data, we showcase the mutually constitutive process of infrastructuring and subjectivization of the “citizen”, bringing attention to the ad hoc, heterogeneously constituted water infrastructures in Pune that aspire to be “smart” even before becoming functional infrastructures. In doing so, we hope to expand possible research trajectories within smart city research agendas by decoupling it from Western assumptions and also by linking them to an interactional account of the everyday relationships among residents, infrastructures, and municipalities
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479570
This article uses findings from a field study of the world’s largest guaranteed employment scheme (NREGA) in India to understand how digital technology mediates work relations and power dynamics within a bureaucracy. In this initiative, upper-level bureaucrats in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh built a digital network to remove local discretion at the “last mile” of an implementation of NREGA. I show how digital infrastructure affords actors at both the first and last mile opportunities to modify software to control as well as subvert certain practices. This article refers to this dialectic phenomenon as “governance by patching” and defines it as a socio-technical instantiation of a top-down process that focuses on small changes, iterative, and political process for positive change. Governance by patching is, therefore, neither a purely technical process nor an exclusively administrative one, but refers to the ability to fix unanticipated problems that arise in the implementation of governance programs by altering the socio-technical systems. The struggle for power continues, but on the new digital terrain.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449285
Telehealth technologies have long remained on the peripheries of healthcare systems that prioritize in-person healthcare provision. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the need to formalize telehealth infrastructures, particularly teleconsultations, to ensure continued care provision through remote mechanisms. In the Indian healthcare context, prior to the pandemic, teleconsultations have been used to substitute for in-person consultations when possible, and to facilitate remote follow-up care without exacerbating pressures on limited personal resources. We conducted a survey and interview study to investigate doctors' and patients' perceptions, experiences, and expectations around teleconsultations, and how these contribute towards supplementing healthcare infrastructures in India, focusing on the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe the efforts of our participants towards infrastructuring telehealth, examining how technologies were adapted to support teleconsultation, how expectations shifted, and how the dynamics of caregiving evolved through this transition. We present implications for the future design and uptake of telehealth, arguing that COVID-19's impact on teleconsultations lays the foundation for new telehealth infrastructures for more inclusive and equitable care.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3476064
The global \emph{community networking} movement promotes locally-managed network infrastructure as a strategy for affordable Internet connectivity. This case study investigates a group of collectively managed WiFi Internet networks in Argentina and the technologists who design the networking hardware and software. Members of these community networks collaborate on maintenance and repair and practice new forms of collective work. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, we show that the networking technologies play a role in the social relations of their maintenance and that they are intentionally configured to do so. For technology designers and deployers, we suggest a path beyond designing for easy repair: since every breakdown is an opportunity to learn, we should design for accessible repair experiences that enable effective collaborative learning.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479608