Abstracts posted for AAG pre-conference on Volunteered Geographic Information

The AAG pre-conference on VGI will be held in Seattle on Monday, April 11th, organized by Sarah Elwood, Mike Goodchild, and Dan Sui.

From the conference website:

Research on volunteered geographic information (VGI) has made substantial progress in recent years in understanding the content and characteristics of this new form of geographic and georeferenced information, developing appropriate methodologies for working with these data, and understanding their societal significance. Among other questions, geographers have made significant progress toward understanding what motivates citizens to contribute to such efforts, assessing the reliability of these data compared to conventionally-curated spatial data, and examining their implications for privacy. This pre-conference will bring together a small group of scholars to take stock of progress to date, identify ongoing research questions, and discuss new directions. We welcome a diverse set of topics, including (but not limited to) the following:

•  The use of VGI in time-critical situations
•  Ethical and legal issues emerging in collection, use, representation of VGI
•  Innovative methods of analyzing, synthesizing, and visualizing VGI
•  New concepts and theories promoted by VGI
•  Data quality and credibility issues in VGI
•  The role and impacts of VGI in activism and civic engagement
•  The epistemological significance of VGI in science
•  The role of social networks in facilitating VGI; and the role of VGI in the study of social networks
•  The relationship between VGI, neogeography, crowdsourcing, citizen science, and related concepts

The meeting will be structured around 5-minute ‘lightning talks’ by all participants and full-group plenary discussion. We will accommodate as many interested participants as possible, but space is limited. Interested participants are also invited to contribute a book chapter for an edited volume on “Volunteered Geographic Information: Theories, methods, and applications” (tentative title, to be published by Springer).

Abstracts and bios for the 20+ participants are located here.  I'm certainly looking forward to this gathering!