Participatory Radiation Information Monitoring with SNS after Fukushima

We developed a series of inexpensive but accurate mobile radiation detectors, which we named Pocket Geiger (POKEGA), to address the urgent desire of ordinary people to measure and share radiation levels in their milieus and to discuss the results of the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima, Japan. This action research reports on a new style of pragmatic model of radiation monitoring, which employs the features of Participatory Design and Participatory Sensing and adopts modern communication platforms such as crowd-funding, open source development, and Facebook. This paper proposes an interaction model between the project management body, and other inclusive corroborators, e.g., ordinary users and experts, and focuses on three development phases of the project: start-up phase, evaluation phase, and operation phase. This paper also considers a reliability assurance model on disaster information sharing between the citizen layer and the official layer by data sharing and discussion activities in the POKEGA community.