Abstract

Citizen Science and Mobile GIS to Improve Homeless Counts
Track: Mobile GIS
Authors: Lynn Shirley, Kevin Remington

Mobile data collection and Citizen Science are being used by a team of GIS specialists from the Geography Department at the University of South Carolina and members of the South Carolina Homeless Coalition to provide a mobile tool to facilitate identifying over-night locations of homeless persons.

The need to know potential and probable locations where homeless spend their evenings prior to an official "count night" drove this project. Although many locations are widely known amongst many people, other locations are more obscure and periodic in nature. The creation of a mobile-based ArcGIS.com application that citizen volunteers deployed to note over-night locations during the three months prior to the count is instrumental in leveraging the volunteer resources to make the count.

The presentation will discuss the methodology of deploying Esri resources, the challenges to protecting sensitive data, and the short-comings and successes of crowd-sourcing techniques for this type of collection.