Organising 8000 volunteers to observe foreign trucking operations - A novel, innovative approach using smartphones and social media

The deregulation of the European transport market has been a controversial topic, characterised by a lack of facts and figures on the actual impact of the regulations. Given the crucial importance of road freight transportation to European society, and the lack of figures and control of foreign vehicles operating domestically in other countries, the purpose of this paper is to present a novel, innovative approach to organise large-scale data collection using smartphones and social media (Facebook). In total, 330 000 observations were collected by 8 000 volunteers, consisting primarily of truck drivers, in Norway, Denmark and Sweden over a period of 10 weeks. To validate the observations, comparisons were made with the GPS logs from four hauliers to measure the data quality of the approach. This paper provides an initial contribution to theory building on novel methodological approach, organizing volunteers using smartphone data collection. It outlines the findings as well as future research on how this innovative methodological approach can be further developed.