ABSTRACT
Recent technological developments are introducing new possibilities for the collection and nature of socioeconomic data. The rapid adoption of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, mobile technology such as telephones and laptops and tablets, all with their digital cameras and GPS technology built in, is giving new possibilities for collecting and analyzing water data. These range from information on the resource and environment status, through how/who is using it, to data on the users themselves. The adoption of mobile telephones has arguably been the most rapid and globally widespread of any technology in history, reaching some of the remotest villages and most vulnerable communities. The possibilities this offers for water data collection have yet to be fully considered and realized, with the potential to support new forms of data collection and moving social data sources beyond the traditional decadal census or specific agency surveys. This new era, often termed “Big Data”, is the information age’s equivalent to the industrial revolution.
