Local governments are increasingly looking for new ways to involve citizens in policy and decision-making, for example by combining public sector data sources with data gathered by citizens. Several examples exist of data gathering where personal mobile devices act as data collectors. While these efforts illustrate the technical capability of data sourcing, they neglect the value of local knowledge where people use their senses to capture and interpret data. Traditional data gathering initiatives, however, exploit this local knowledge to inform policy makers, e.g., neighborhood policing. To understand data gathering processes of these traditional data gathering initiatives, three cases are examined. We analyze these cases, focusing on the various elements they contain, concluding how digital data gathering can be informed by these traditional variants, concerning what the benefits of using digital means can be for data gathering and how traditional initiatives ensure data re-use by the public sector.