Locast Civic Media

Civic, Design Research | No Comments |

Locast Civic Media

 

The paper “Locast Civic Media – Extending civic engagement boundaries through mobile media and hyper-local conversations” has been accepted at SocialUrb2011 workshop on Social Connection in the Urban Space -  within the Third IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (October 9 – 11, 2011 at MIT -Cambridge, MA).

What is Locast Civic Media? Locast Civic Media is an integrated mobile and web platform that provides tools to involve individuals in local and community-oriented activities such as civic engagement, participatory journalism and citizen ethnographies. The paper presents the outcomes of an initial deployment in the city of Porto Alegre (Brazil) with the local students of PUCRS – FAMECOS university (November 2009).

From the paper abstract:

Always-on connectivity, video production capabilities, social networking, and location-based services make mobile phones important tools for citizen journalism. Drawing on emerging patterns, our research focuses on transposing global media production and circulation practices to local contexts. Our emphasis is on joining urban conversations with civic knowledge sharing practices to build information-based communities. We present an integrated, ubiquitous, mobile media and geo-social networking platform that proposes tools for open-publication, collaborative-authoring, and production. This framework allows social content dissemination through mobile devices and the web. In this paper, we discuss our recent findings from research on mobile civic media, presenting our design methods, implementation details, and a field study arranged in Porto Alegre (Brazil). Finally, we discuss our insights and future design considerations for platform development.