Forage Berkeley
To test the hypotheses about the nature of the network-landscape relationship and make this thesis, in the words of one advisor, “more than an interesting conversation at a cocktail party,” I started a project with two partners, Alexandra Harker and Will Q. Smith, called Forage Berkeley (http://forageberkeley.blogspot.com/).[1] At its core, Forage Berkeley is an online mapping system that allows neighbors to share the location and condition of fruit trees in the public realm. The design intent of the project was to connect people to healthy, locally-grown food and facilitate the maintenance of productive urban landscapes.
Forage Berkeley used crowdsourcing to map the location of public fruit trees in Berkeley
[1] Forage Berkeley was a project for the class: “Research Methods in Environmental Design,” taught by professor Peter Bosselmann.
Forage Berkeley used crowdsourcing to map the location of public fruit trees in Berkeley
[1] Forage Berkeley was a project for the class: “Research Methods in Environmental Design,” taught by professor Peter Bosselmann.
The theory behind the project relies on tools at the social framework end of projection and sampling infrastructure. To populate the Forage Berkeley map with the locations of fruit trees, the project relies on crowdsourced information generated by people geotagging the location of fruit trees. (To get the project started, however, we geotagged approximately 30 trees in South Berkeley.) Once the map was populated data—an ongoing process—people could use the map to locate fruits and vegetables in the public realm, an instance of emergent urbanism being used in relation to food systems.
Forage Berkeley’s online framework augmented traditional word-of-mouth networks to facilitate the harvesting of fruit from local trees. The core of the project was a Google map that could be edited by users, seen at top-center, above. The Forage Berkeley blog, right-center, was the main public access point to the project. The Google Blogger back end, at left-center, allowed us to track anonymous user data for the experiment.
Forage Berkeley’s online framework augmented traditional word-of-mouth networks to facilitate the harvesting of fruit from local trees. The core of the project was a Google map that could be edited by users, seen at top-center, above. The Forage Berkeley blog, right-center, was the main public access point to the project. The Google Blogger back end, at left-center, allowed us to track anonymous user data for the experiment.
The first generation of Forage Berkeley, which launched in the fall of 2009, continues to helps people find food, but had many of the kinks and flaws of a beta-launch. Nonetheless, user data that we gathered from web analytics and an online survey let us know that while the website was not trafficked heavily, it was updated, used, and shared in exactly the ways that we intended.
The addition of crowdsourced data was stimulated by activity on Craigslist and Facebook. The number of site cisits and the addition of new trees to the map correlated to activity on online social networks.
Research conducted to support the online data also supported another important conclusion: people already had analog social networks to facilitate the sharing of food. In response to written surveys distributed in neighborhoods of Berkeley where fruit trees are known to be found, people reported arrangements with neighbors, informal fruit-sharing groups, and a desire for greater collaboration. Much as founder Mark Zuckerberg argues that Facebook isn’t “trying to build a community” but augment existing ones, Forage Berkeley simply reinforces neighborhood connections that already exist.
Forage Berkeley generates a system of network-landscape interaction with crowdsourcing, geotagging and emergent urbanism.