icegov2012 proceedings

Crowdsourcing as Data Sharing: A Regional Web-based
Real Estate Development Database
Robert Goodspeed
MIT Department of Urban Studies and
Planning
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Room 9-415
Cambridge, MA 02139
+1 202-321-2743
rgoodspe@mit.edu
ABSTRACT
The paper describes a web-based database of residential and
commercial real estate development projects, created by a
regional urban planning agency in Metropolitan Boston. In Phase
I, now complete, the tool is used to facilitate inter-agency
information sharing, demonstrating the ability of web-base data
collection tools to increase information sharing between
government agencies by reducing transaction costs. Phase II, now
under development, will expand the functionality of the website to
allow the general public to contribute information to the database,
as well as view and download its contents. The project is unusual
in its integration of a crowdsourcing paradigm with traditional
methods of spatial information sharing. The project demonstrates
the potential for technology to facilitate data sharing in favorable
contexts where interorganizational relationships and sharing
norms exist.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4.2 [Information Systems Applications] – Types of Systems –
database, spatial information. J.1 [Administrative Data
Processing]: Government – urban planning.
General Terms
Management, Design, Theory.
Keywords
Crowdsourcing, spatial data sharing, urban development, Web
2.0.
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Christian Spanring
Metropolitan Area Planning Council
60 Temple Place
Boston, MA 02111
+1 617-451-2770
cspanring@mapc.org
460
1. INTRODUCTION
Timothy Reardon
Metropolitan Area Planning Council
60 Temple Place
Boston, MA 02111
+1 617-451-2770
treardon@mapc.org
1.1 The problem
Urban planners and policymakers in Metropolitan Boston often
want to answer simple questions about the urban region, such as:
how is the region growing? Where are new housing and office
buildings being built? Is this growth harming sensitive
environmental resources, like forest and wetlands? Is affordable
housing being constructed near jobs and public services?
Until recently, accurate data did not readily exist to answer any of
these questions. Only large projects are permitted by the state, and
the metropolitan region’s 101 independent municipalities makes
tracking small projects difficult. Most importantly, it is difficult to
discover the development “pipeline” – project proposals known to
local authorities but not yet under construction. If available, this
information could be used to for a wide variety of policy and
planning purposes, including anticipating transportation
bottlenecks and evaluating existing regulations.
Sharing spatial information about cities is increasingly important
given the accelerated pace of urban change, the need for
monitoring to enable smart cities, and the public’s demands for
greater transparency and open data. Set in a fragmented
metropolitan area, this paper describes a data-sharing project
designed to combine crowdsourcing methods with traditional data
sharing approaches to improve sharing of real estate development
project information among government agencies and the general
public. The resulting database and web-based interface will be
referred to as the “development database,” and a prototype is
available online at http://dd.mapc.org.
Metropolitan Boston includes 101 incorporated cities and towns,
which range widely in population and government size and
capacity. Municipal record-keeping practices vary widely, and
include paper records, spreadsheets, and some digital permitting
systems. Where digital data exists, municipalities have developed
varied database schema that correspond with local land use
regulations making data integration difficult. Other data sources,
such as U.S. Census datasets or the database of large-scale
projects subject to the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act
are incomplete, infrequently updated, and lack information about
proposed projects still in early planning phases.