Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how citizen scientists decided to share their data or knowledge based on a practice-based investigation into the data flow between online and offline data practices, meetings and alignments of multiple socio-technical and socio-political configurations.

Paper long abstract:

Most of the discourse about knowledge economy has viewed knowledge exchange and data sharing positively. However, as more research suggests that the increasingly personalised and data intensive economy is built on the exploitation of datafied bodies and digital labour, it is a concern if people should continue to sh\are their data or knowledge at all. Indeed, as the recent incident about the fitness tracking app Strava giving away location of secret US army bases reveals, data about exercise routes shared online could even lead to identification of the users (soldiers in this case) and further to breaching national security. This paper questions the culture of sharing the data collected by citizen scientists from a practice-based perspective. The 'data journey' methodology (Bates et al. 2016) guides the exploration of citizen scientists' data practices, datafication process of their everyday mundane routines, and see how the culture of sharing is challenged when different social worlds, cultures, and values systems collapse and intersect.