Engaging the Commons in Participatory Sensing: Practice, Problems, and Promise in the Context of Dockless Bikesharing

Participatory sensing refers to the sensing paradigm where human participants use personal mobile devices to generate and share data from their surroundings. It holds the promise of providing information that is otherwise challenging to access, which sets the stage for understanding and resolving various social issues. However, difficulties in engaging participants often hinder the fulfillment of this promise. The current paper presents a qualitative study in the context of dockless bikesharing, where participatory sensing constitutes a backbone of the bike status monitoring system. We conducted in-depth interviews with 30 participants. These participants came from different emergent groups who took part in filing status reports for shared bikes. Our analysis indicated close associations among participants' models of engagement, their perceived (dis)connections with the sensing data, and their situated interpretation of the incentives. Based on these findings, we propose ways to engage the commons in participatory sensing for dockless bikesharing and beyond.