C’SQUARE - The Urban Comfort Rating by C’SQUARE for Urban Comfort

Please find below the judging results for your proposal.

Finalist Evaluation

Judges'' ratings

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Judges'' comments

Great idea well presented. I suspect that the best impact may be if this app is integrated within some existing platform with a lot of users such as the google maps and local guides, as it will prove difficult to capture new users to a new app. There are some similar crowdsourced environmental 'discomfort' indicator apps such as literati (I don't use it, but I think you take photos of litter and report it) - I'm not sure if they are really effective as stand-alone apps. The statement that there are no possible negative unintended consequences is false - these always exist and are hard to predict (eg competing bicycle sharing companies in china that hire goons to hide/destroy each other's bicycles, or restaurant owners who give bad reviews to their competitors). Great idea. Good luck with execution.

C’SQUARE proposal offers unique and interesting alternative conceptualization of human urban dynamics, and how urban living conditions are dominated by environmental constraints; this has the potential to be a powerful and highly accessible outreach/ engagement approach that can motivate citizens to engage / influence urban planning.

This proposal is one of few which actually combine several other proposals, as required for this contest. It is well presented and detailed, and seeks minimal funding for the type of impact envisaged. Whilst neither citizen science and use of apps for social engagement are new, the proposed combination is imaginative. The proposal should however also make much more effort to include the whole realm of biodiversity citizen science, an application which has really taken off globally, for recording presence/loss of species in urban environs, and thus measures of the 'greening' of cities, a hugely important indicator of 'livability' and comfort. This is especially important as global temperatures ramp up, in terms of cooling of cities and making them more accessible to biodiversity, rather than as increasing barriers to movement as urban areas expand. A really useful proposal which meets the requirements of this contest.

Semi-Finalist Evaluation

Judges'' ratings

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Judges'' comments

Well written and appealing use of citizen science platform. Although not a new concept, a relatively novel application in terms of generating citizen 'comfort' perspectives. In going forward, the proposal needs to deal in more detail with the issue of data transparency, and misuse rather than just 'fake posts' i.e. for nefarious targeted pirate/ambush marketing, and potential impacts on property values as a result of information generated. Additional information regarding aspects such as ease of access - public transport, traffic congestion, crime, etc would be very useful for scaling beyond cities (and countries) such as Zurich/Switzerland with greater populations, less infrastructure, more traffic, etc. - pilot projects in Lagos, Beijing, Johannesburg etc would be much more insightful.

We suggest to try to expand the focus and description to also support action in cities in developing countries - this will make it more global and appealing to emerging economies as well

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Annalyn Bachmann

Feb 5, 2018
10:01

Staff

1 |

Comment from the author who had issues posting to the platform:

To ensure highest data security and transparency as well as limit data misuse and fake news, several arrangements will be implemented.

Daily and yearly rating limitation per IP-address and user.
Algorithm measures user’s deviation of the average rating. If the rating is always much higher or lower someone can be noted, warned and blocked.
With GPS-tracker we can find out if a person is rating places where he/she never has been.
Peer-to-peer review as well as a customer service. Only the customer service can delete posts and ratings and block users.
C’SQUARE is open source and therefore users can help developing the IT structure as well as security arrangements.
All contributions must be based on real experiences therefore a safety/usage policy will be created. Users who abuse this trust will be removed from C’SQUARE.
All data are public and accessible, hence citizens with personal interest can be sorted out and removed.
All perceived citizen’s data will be cross-linked with several scientific data sets and therefore fake deviations can be sorted out.
Statistics can determine outliers and we believe the mass of citizen data will conceal fake information and personal interests.

Marie-claire Graf

Feb 5, 2018
05:19

Member

2 |

Proposal
creator

Furthermore we included some adaptations for its use in developing countries and searched for helpful and reliable partners to expand C'SQUARE to developing countries. Thanks for this insightful feedback (finally wifi is back).