What have I been up to - a student blog

My name is Billy and I’ve just started the second year of my PhD in Geography at the University of Sydney looking at bushfire preparation and the role of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and social media for building resilience through community engagement.

It’s an exciting time for me and I’ve recently experienced some fantastic opportunities with my research. I was fortunate to be invited to a week-long training school in Florence, Italy, earlier this month with a group of really gifted researchers and students representing places all over Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australia.

The programme was the Vespucci Institute, and learning was centred on VGI and Citizen Science and various issues and topics from how to assess quality of public-contributed data to how to engage participants and ethical associated considerations, as well as practical exercises such as how to design a grant proposal or capture map-data in the field with smartphones.

This really was a unique opportunity for me to share ideas and learn from others in this emerging field and make valuable international research connections, and I had a great time - the Italian summer really was a treat!

Things back home have been exciting for my research too. I undertook fieldwork with the Tasmania Fire Service earlier this year, and am now at the stage where I have started writing up and presenting the survey results.

I presented preliminary findings at the Institute of Australian Geographers Conference in Melbourne in July with some positive feedback, and I look forward to presenting a poster on the work at the upcoming BNHCRC/AFAC conference in Wellington in September!

For any questions about any of this, or if you’d like more info on any part of my project, please get in touch.

Cheers,
Billy

E: billy.haworth@sydney.edu.au
Blog: http://exploringplacesandpeople.blogspot.co.uk/