Participatory Sensing for Urban Communities

Social Tapestries views participatory sensing as the principal supporting technology to enable grass-roots groups and communities to track and act on information about their local environment. In this article, we report on our experiences with a low-cost open source hardware and software platform, which we specifically developed for this task. We describe how we employed this platform to support community workshops and art, and highlight the lessons learnt through our involvement with urban communities in London, UK. We conclude by identifying the main ingredients for the development of a successful strategy for the use of this and other similar platforms in supporting environmental sustainability through sustainable communities.