A broken street light on the road you regularly walk on can be a great nuisance. It also encourages criminals. In their paper “The influence of street lighting on crime and fear of crime,” Stephen Atkins, Sohail Husain and Angele Storey argue that good street lights increase opportunities for surveillance and encourage people to notice suspicious activity, thereby acting as a deterrent for criminals.
Though there are street lights right around Kathmandu valley, many of them don’t work. Instead of blaming the government for not fixing them, Youth Innovation Lab (YI-Lab), a non-profit civic tech company have, in coordination with NAXA, a Kathmandu-based geo-IT company, launched the ‘LightsON’ campaign to map street lights of Kathmandu valley. The mission is to put pressure on the Kathmandu Metropolitan City to come up with the right policy to ensure periodic maintenance of street lights in Kathmandu. Anyone in Kathmandu valley can contribute!
The campaign was launched on the International Open Data Day on March 2, with an ambitious goal of collecting data on 10,000 street lights of Kathmandu valley by engaging digital volunteers. YI-Lab sees open data as a tool to ensure bureaucratic accountability. For those who do not understand open data, you can think of Wikipedia. Users do not need to sign-up or login to view its contents and they can also edit the information with references so that others can benefit from the available content. There is no fee to use, or contribute on, such platforms.
YI-Lab came up with the idea of mapping street lights and help-ing local governments use data to solve this urban challenge. NAXA then developed a mobile app and an interactive web interface to support this campaign technically. Pradip Khatiwada, the executive director of YI-Lab, reveals that they current-ly have data on 2,500 street lights collected through crowd sourcing. The campaign aims to collect infor-mation on 10,000 street lights by August. College students are being informed and trained to use the mobile app through which they can contribute.
Currently, “Lights On” application is only available on ‘Play Store’ and anyone with a smart phone and an email account can download it for free. The data the user has collected is recorded and verified via their email addresses. When a new mem-ber logs in, he or she can contribute by filling the ‘Street Lights Form’ in which they will be asked the details, such as the location of the street light, its functionality, and the status of the pole.
The user should take a photo of the street light for evidence and the precise location of the street light is established with the help of GPS. This can even be done offline. When the user has internet access, they can upload the data through the app. The data is made open and visualized through an interactive digital map at light.utilitymaps.org.
There were a few challenges in crowdsourcing for the project. The team behind this initiative informs that when the first batch of 30 col-lege students were oriented on the campaign, the students were momen-tarily excited. However, when they were asked if they would contrib-ute to the initiative, only four raised their hands. Their reluctance to con-tribute suggested an incentive was necessary. Now, those who contrib-ute data on 100 street lights get a campaign T-shirt and a certificate mentioning that they are ‘Digital Vol-unteers’. This has led to a dramat-ic rise in data collection, informs the team.
YI-Lab’s Khatiwada says that in developed countries broken street lights are fixed within 24 hours. But in Nepal there is seemingly no one to take care of the street lights after they are installed. Thus a related goal is to present the collected data to the mayor’s office for urgent action. Khatiwada claims this is not a compe-tition and they just want to help the government do its job better through evidence-based data.
