Does DE need a C?A proposal for a DE curriculum

The vision of a digital earth(DE)is continuously evolving,and the next-generation infrastructures,platforms and applications are being implemented.In this article,we attempt to initiate a debate within the DE and with affine communities about‘why’a digital earth curriculum(DEC)is needed,‘how’it should be developed,and‘what’it could look like.It is impossible to do justice to the Herculean effort of DEC development without extensive consultations with the broader community.We propose a frame for the debate(what,why,and how of a DEC)and a rationale for and elements of a curriculum for educating the coming generations of digital natives and indicate possible realizations.We particularly argue that a DEC is not a déjàvu of classical research and training agendas of geographic information science,remote sensing,and similar fields by emphasizing its unique characteristics.

Sensors, empowerment, and accountability: a Digital Earth view from East Africa

Several innovative‘participatory sensing’initiatives are under way in East Africa.They can be seen as local manifestations of the global notion of Digital Earth.The initiatives aim to amplify the voice of ordinary citizens,improve citizens’capacity to directly influence public service delivery and hold local government accountable.The popularity of these innovations is,among other things,a local reaction to the partial failure of the millennium development goals(MDGs)to deliver accurate statistics on public services in Africa.Empowered citizens,with access to standard mobile phones,can‘sense’via text messages and report failures in the delivery of local government services.The public disclosure of these reports on the web and other mass media may pressure local authorities to take remedial action.In this paper,we outline the potential and research challenges of a‘participatory sensing’platform,which we call a‘human sensor web.’Digital Africa’s first priority could be to harness continent-wide and national data as well as local information resources,collected by citizens,in order to monitor,measure and forecast MDGs.

Digital earth applications in the twenty-first century

In these early years of the twenty-first century,we must look at how the truly cross-cutting information technology supports other innovations,and how it will funda-mentally change the information positions of government,private sector and the scientific domain as well as the citizen.In those positions,location will be a prominent linking pin.The classical top-down system architectures of information exchange will be diluted by peer-to-peer and bottom-up channels,forcing us to rethink their designs.We should not only focus on better architectures,but need to attend to a different economy of information exchange,in which the‘client’is not only the information sink,but has become an important source as well.The laws of this rising‘infoconomy’have yet to be settled on.This special issue on‘Digital Earth Applications:Technological design and organizational strategies’brings together a number of papers that shed light on this future information ecosystem in which location-specific information will be exchanged between stakeholders.The introduction presents a framework that combines geoinformation streams and organisations brokering between government,science,private sector and citizens.This novel framework helps us improve the appreciation of those papers.