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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 2
History
2.1 DIGITAL CITIES
We can ask to what degree digital cities and community networks are examples of civic engagement. While most have the goal of supporting community involvement, they all have something of a “Chamber of Commerce” quality to them in the sense that their primary goals are to connect businesses to citizens and to publicize and popularize the community to outsiders. The need for significant technical capital in terms of both money and infrastructure meant that large institutions such as telecoms, city governments, and universities needed to work together to make the digital cities a reality. These entities view the community and its needs differently than citizens might. In the next section, we explore the emergence of civic activities on platforms not designed specifically for this purpose and therefore without design constraints on activity.
Van Dijk (2012) identifies four distinct periods in the development of digital democracy: (1) teledemocracy in the 1980s as networked computing environments first appeared; (2) virtual community in the 1990s in which communities of interest and locality could interact and share (with an emphasis on replacing “lost community”); (3) new democracy at the turn of the century in which the global reach of the internet, the possibilities for mass participation became apparent; and (4) Web 2.0 era as the dawn of social media and civic journalism made participatory environments prevalent. We focus in this book on the last era, however in this chapter we spend some time charting how we got here.
As soon as it became clear that information and computing systems would break out beyond large corporations and military and scientific applications, and that their uses were vastly broader than accounting, record keeping, and mathematical calculation, people began to imagine their use in civic and governmental realms. When document processing and hypertext emerged in the 1970s, an early dream was that public documents, which were printed at great cost and either mailed to citizens or kept in publicly accessible places such as post offices and libraries, could instead reside online. By the 1990s, community-level and city-level websites were appearing which informed citizens about and involved them in civic affairs. The so-called “digital cities” movement emerged at this time with many forward-thinking communities developing a cyber-presence for municipalities and their citizens. Often the metaphor was tied closely to real urban spaces, with a community being represented spatially, citizens having “home” pages, and navigation being accomplished by moving from place to place though the simulated environment.
The internet emerged from its development into broader common use in the 1980s, and almost immediately along with it came the dream that people could use it to form neighborhood, city, state, national, and transnational amalgams to pursue common ends. The phrase “digital city” was used to indicate the movement of city-level and community-level activities of civic life into the digital domain.
Van den Besselaar and Beckers (2005) trace the origin of the term “digital city” to the founding in 1993 of De Digitale Stad (DDS) in Amsterdam, widely considered to be the first attempt at creating a connected urban network with civic goals beyond simply experimenting with emerging technologies. DDS arose in an environment that had already appropriated the new technology of cable television for community access purposes. An amalgam of hackers and community activists embarked on the DDS project with the goal of offering universal internet access and developing applications that citizens could use to accomplish civic ends. According to van den Besselaar and Beckers (2005):
“The organizers wanted to introduce the Internet and its possibilities to a wider population by providing free access to the Internet, creating an electronic public domain for social and political debate and enabling free expression and social experimentation in cyberspace” (p. 68).
One of the first accomplishments of DDS was to link politicians with citizens and to set up political discussion forums to support elections taking place in 1994. As far as I know, this is the first use of a digital network environment to support an election. Although it grew quickly at first, DDS had a difficult time transitioning through various phases of technological change, particularly the introduction of the World Wide Web, and the ultimate commercialization of the internet. The rise of commercial providers of competing services such as email and search tools eroded the large user base who focused primarily on these particular services.
A significant feature of DDS was its use of an urban metaphor to organize its services and features. DDS contained a “library,” “post office,” “city hall,” “arts and culture center,” “election center,” special interest “cafes,” and other virtual places. This metaphor was maintained when DDS switched from a text-based interface to a graphical interface, and the latter allowed designers to present the “digital city” spatially as a city map and to support “strolling” as a navigational metaphor. Users were encouraged to have a “house” in a virtual neighborhood, which was an early version of representing the self in cyberspace. While this drew considerable attention from researchers as an innovative and interesting experiment in virtual public space, it may have proved limiting both technically (there were limits on the number of houses and sizes of neighborhoods, for example) and in terms of the constraints of the metaphor with regard to imaginative new applications. An attempt to deploy a 3D interface to DDS and integrate it with live television was probably ahead of its time in the 1990s and resulted in a reduction in users who had the bandwidth and computing power to use DDS. By 2001, DDS had disappeared (see Van den Besselaar and Beckers, 2005 for an extensive history).
Several community network efforts with similarities to DDS appeared around the U.S. at about the same time (Schuler, 1994). Examples include Big Sky Telegraph, Berkeley Community Memory (Farrington and Pine, 1996), Santa Monica Public Electronic Network (Rogers, Collins-Jarvis, and Schmitz, 1994), Seattle Community Network (SCN), and Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV). According to Yasuoka, Ishida, and Aurigig (2010), the earliest digital city was the Cleveland Free-Net, founded in 1986 as a research project within Case Western Reserve University.
The Cleveland Free-Net (CFN) was a local network initially not connected to the then-nascent internet. It provided email and online bulletin board services to its users, who numbered almost 160,000 by the time of its discontinuation in 1995. The evolution of the CFN was largely an experiment in technical capability, however it was also an early example of an information network in which the users played a significant role in producing its content. The founder of CFN, who also envisioned a “National Public Telecomputing Network” (NPTN) in advance of the fully realized internet, described several requirements for public networks (Schuler, 1994). They should be:
• community-based, such that everyone has a stake in the content;
• reciprocal, where users are both information consumers and producers;
• contribution-based, in which the content of forums is generated by users;
• unrestricted, allowing anyone to contribute anything (with limitations on harassing, criminal, or libelous content);
• accessible and inexpensive, to maximize equitable use; and
• modifiable, whereby the system and services themselves can be changed in a participatory manner by users.
As we will see, these requirements for community networks have interesting resonance with the requirements that political theorists place on open deliberative spaces. The founders of CFN encouraged developers of other “Free Nets” to measure desirable outcomes such as increased community cohesion; better-informed citizens; greater use of educational and training resources over the lifespan; and an “inclusive, ethical, and enlightened democracy.”
The SCN is notable because, like DDS, many local activist groups were involved in its funding. Initially, an environmental group called Sustainable Seattle established a home page on the site, followed closely by a homeless women’s network called the Homeless Network, and a feminist organization called BaseCamp Seattle. BaseCamp Seattle held early meetings combining technology education and awareness with political workshops (Silver, 2004). Growth of SCN was fast for the time, starting with 700 users in 1994 and growing to 13,000 in 1997 (Schuler, 1996).
The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), launched in 1993, stands in stark contrast to many of the “free net” projects because of the extensive attention paid to it by behavioral and social scientists (Carroll, 2005). Like CFN, BEV was also a collaboration between a university, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), and its surrounding community. The promise of BEV, and community networks in general, is reflected in this quote from an early research project:
“[C]ommunity networks are a potentially radical medium within which to manage community history: they augment the real, physical communities in which we live our fragmented lives by supporting distributed, asynchronous, personal interactions: we can get to the campfire or General Store anytime and anywhere” (Carroll et al., 1995, p. 6).
Surveys taken during the early days of BEV showed that people’s primary interests in the network were “learning and teaching, civic interests, social relations, support for work or business, consumer information, entertainment, and medical services” (Carroll and Rosson, 1996). When it was founded, BEV maintained a discussion forum for policies related to use of the network, however this forum quickly became a hub for discussion of civic issues such as downtown parking policies and for community issues such as restaurant reviews and birth announcements (Carroll and Rosson, 1996).
BEV initially had two primary goals, to connect citizens with government electronically and to help businesses create and utilize a digital presence (Carroll, 2005). The goal of connecting citizens with each other was not prominent at the outset, but as various local organizations began to develop presences on BEV, many community-building activities began to evolve. Carroll (2005) describes how senior groups, churches, and other organizations successfully occupied BEV and created social communities that might otherwise have not formed.
Early on BEV became a participatory project in which members built their own content. Eventually, as other user-driven content sites became prominent, BEV evolved into an organizational portal. Still, this DIY feature is often referenced as a reason for the long-term success of BEV (Carroll, 2005; Carroll and Rosson, 1996).
BEV successfully navigated the transition from a text-based network to a predominantly graphical network on the World Wide Web. While BEV itself never utilized a strict place-based metaphor such as DDS, a companion project called MOOsburg did graft a geographical coordinate system with landmarks and community meeting tools to the BEV infrastructure (Carroll et al., 2001), but this effort remained largely outside of the mainstream use of BEV.
BEV remained in service until 2015. Its take-down notice recognizes the fate of many early “digital city” and community network services, that commercial providers ultimately won the day: “This transition recognizes the success of BEV in that many of the services that it has provided in a speculative, experimental context are now widely available from a variety of providers” (from the BEV Transition Announcement, http://www.bev.net/transition-announcement).
While early digital cities often made attempts to render their interfaces graphically, none went quite as far in this direction as Helsinki, Finland (Linturi, Koivunen, and Sulkanen, 1999) and Kyoto, Japan (Ishida and Isbister, 2000; Ishida, 2002). In these cases, attempts were made to create a digital urban experience using a virtual city environment in which government services, shopping opportunities, and interaction were enabled via avatars. Digital City Kyoto originated from NTT and Kyoto University in 1998. The concept was to create a virtual space that was isomorphic to the real city. The researchers imagined a three-layer architecture consisting of an information layer, interface layer, and interaction layer. In anticipation of the smart city concept, Digital City Kyoto was envisioned to have sensors and monitors on physical objects that would aggregate data and represent it in a visualization of real urban space. This information layer relied heavily on GIS data and address information to situate the user in a realistic visual depiction of the city. The interface layer generated 2D and 3D representations of space using real images. Finally, the interaction layer was intended to employ chat software for interactions among people through their avatars and chatbots for directing tours and helping in wayfinding.
2.2 E-GOVERNMENT PORTALS
In parallel with the digital cities movement, researchers and practitioners from the areas of political science and public policy have engaged in efforts to develop portals to local and national government services. Researchers began to explore the idea that governments and citizens could interact electronically almost at the birth of the internet (for example, see Braman, 1995; Stenberg, Ayres, and Kettinger, 1983). In general, their concerns were not with the formation of communities or necessarily citizen deliberation, but rather the opening of channels between government and citizens for information dissemination and transaction, productivity and cost impacts, the legal and bureaucratic issues involved in information sharing, matters of transparency and privacy, standards, relations among levels of government, intergovernmental (and even international) boundaries, and the lines between public and private interests in information management. Much of the literature on e-government was (and is) published in the information science literature and, more recently, government- and policy-related journals and conferences (Belanger and Carter, 2012). According to Grönlund and Horan (2005), the information systems field has dominated in conducting research and developing theory in the area of e-government systems (cf. Andersen and Henriksen, 2005; Grönlund, 2004).
Proponents of e-government systems argued from the beginning that they might bring fundamental changes to how government works. Fountain (2002) predicted that information technology in government would bring positive changes to social, economic, and political aspects of government. While adoption of new e-government systems has been consistent and widespread, positive impacts have been seen mostly in productivity and efficiency gains rather than in fundamental practices. In a significant overview of the adoption of information technologies in government, Kraemer and King (2006) concluded the following:
• “[T]echnology [is] useful in some cases of administrative reform, but only in cases where expectations for reform are already well-established. IT application does not cause reform.”
• “IT application has brought relatively little change to organization structures, and seems to reinforce existing structures.”
• “[T]he primary beneficiaries [of information technology] have been functions favored by the dominant political-administrative coalitions in public administrations, and not those of technical elites, middle managers, clerical staff, or ordinary citizens.”
• “Government managers have a good sense of the potential uses of IT in their own interests, and in cases where their interests coincide with government interests, they push IT application aggressively.”
In other words, the adoption of information technologies has been largely non-transformational.
Analysis and benchmarking of government portals (Rorissa, Demissie, and Pardo, 2011) and websites often distinguish between several levels of service, roughly as follows.
• Information dissemination from government to citizens (G2C).
• Rudimentary two-way communication between government and citizens such as e-mail (G2C and C2G).
• Online transaction processing, e.g., licensing, permitting, payments. In later stages voting and rulemaking (participation in legislation).
• Citizen engagement in highly interactive and collaborative endeavors in support of civic, governmental, and political activities (C2C, sometimes referred to as “government 2.0”).
• Collaborative, open government (includes leveraging of citizen-generated data and crowdsourcing of civic solutions both in collaboration with, and independent of, government).
Bimber (2000) argued at the beginning of the century for abandonment of ideas like “cyber-democracy” or “e-government,” which imply that a new of civic participation is emerging from use of the internet and other information technologies:
“Analysis of civic engagement might well proceed, I believe, by modeling a civic landscape that is growing increasingly information rich and communication intensive, rather than one that is permeated by one technology or another. Technologies change and evolve over time, of course, but the trend toward lower and lower marginal costs of information and communication will likely continue for the foreseeable future. If information technology is a cause, its proximate effect is to create societies that are in many ways more information rich and communication intensive, societies where the marginal cost of information and communication is very low. The question, then, becomes one of understanding the ultimate effects that follow from those new informational circumstances” (Bimber, 2000, p. 331).
Bimber argues that instead of considering the internet to be revolutionary, we should consider it to be one in a long series of changes (albeit, a dramatic change) in the history of information management (Castells, 1996), and that research should focus on how organizations and individuals adapt their practices accordingly. Bimber’s argument is that we should view changes in civic engagement in the era of the internet as an evolutionary adaptation to dramatic shifts in the global information ecology.
A significant feature of the internet, according to Bimber (2000), is the reduction in “information cost,” or the reduction in resources required to produce and disseminate information broadly and swiftly. He predicted many outcomes with regard to political and civic participation, including:
• greater fragmentation and pluralism in the structure of civic engagement as information efforts become more specialized and focused;
• replacing of large political organizations that persist through multiple events (e.g., political parties) with more flexible, special-issue, and temporary ad-hoc groups;
• a rise in smaller political parties and reduction in the power of big parties;
• more rapid cycling of the political agenda and acceleration of the pace of the public agenda;
• a “deinstitutionalization” of civic life;
• a multiplication in opportunities for learning about civic issues and becoming involved in activism;
• a potential for limiting perception of the common public good as aggregates of special interests gain more of the public attention and set more of the public agenda; and
• a potential trade-off between liberty and deliberation about the common good.
Several researchers, in studies of use of electronic portals like BEV, found that early adopters tended to be more civic minded than those who began using civic components of the internet later (Kohut, 1999; Patterson and Kavanaugh, 2001; Kavanaugh and Patterson, 2001). They argue that increases in civic engagement and community involvement that seem to be internet related are actually a phase of technology adoption rather than a true change in behavior.
2.3 OPEN GOVERNMENT
As early as the 1950s it was recognized that data collected by the government was useful when aggregated across silos and also that it should be available to citizens (Parks, 1957). Political turmoil in the 1970s concerning leaked government documents (the Pentagon Papers in particular) created a lively discussion about citizens’ “right to know” about information that the government collected or created (Ivester, 1977), a controversy that finds new relevance in the era of Wikileaks. Jaeger, Bertot, and Shuler (2010) argue that access to and dissemination of government data are core founding principles in the U.S., and many European countries have similarly found the right of citizens to government data to be fundamental (Gomes and Soares, 2014). The open data movement has seen successes in many countries, including the establishment of data.gov and the associated Open Government Directive promulgated by the Obama administration in the U.S., and Open Data Strategy for Europe (European Commission, 2013), a United Nations Statement on Open Government Data for Citizen Engagement (United Nations, 2013), and many others (Gomes and Soares, 2014; Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014a).
The significance of the open data movement for changing the relations between citizens and governments is a major research area (Bertot et al. 2014; Ubaldi, 2013; Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014b). However, there is an argument that the e-government portal movement should give way to the open data movement (Robinson et al., 2009), turning control of data organization, presentation, and interpretation over to non-government entities, media, and interested citizens. Proponents argue that open data will lead to greater transparency, and hence to better oversight by citizens (Andersen, 2009; Bertot, Jaeger and Grimes, 2010a), greater civic participation (Francolli, 2011; Wahid, 2012), and more informed collaboration and debate (Ubaldi, 2013). McDermott (2010) outlines transparency, participation, and collaboration as the three hallmarks of open government (cf. Meijer, Curtin, and Hillebrandt, 2012).
A counterargument is that big data is too big and unorganized to be utilized effectively by anyone without significant digital tools and expertise and that big data is easily misinterpreted either intentionally or unintentionally. The most extreme form of this argument is that there is no such thing as “raw data” (Gitelman, 2013) and that all data has gone through some interpretive lens (Davies and Frank, 2013).
Open government and big data initiatives bump up against social media when we consider the possibility of “Social Government,” or government and public services co-designed and co-produced by citizens and government entities (Bertot, Jaeger, and Grimes, 2010; Bertot, Jaeger, and Hanse, 2012; Bertot, Jaeger, Munson, and Glaisyer, 2010; Ferro et al., 2013; Mergel, 2013a; Scherer, Wimmer, and Strykowski, 2015). Attempts at designing social government systems, or at understanding how social government might be facilitated by social media platforms, identify several steps in co-production:
• identifying problems and needs;
• development of ideas;
• design of services for the public;
• implementation and diffusion of public services; and
• monitoring of public services.
Social government analysis recognizes that multiple stakeholders are involved in these steps, and social media can play the role of intermediary in bringing these stakeholders together. In this view, social media can be an enabler of crowdsourced problem solving involving citizens, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and others (Chun et al., 2010; Doan, Ramakrishnan, and Halevy, 2011). Exploring inter-organizational collaboration using an open social media platform called WeChat that connects government entities, citizens, and university stakeholders, Wang, Medaglia, and Jensen (2016) found that collaboration was characterized by an ad-hoc and non-linear management of time, a sense of shared commitment to the accomplishment of tasks, serendipitous recruitment of team members based on expertise, and a transition from formal/professional to informal/private collaboration. This type of networked, collaborative government is recognized in the public administration literature as “New Public Service” (Brainard and McNutt, 2010), and is considered the most desirable way for government and citizens to interact (Bonsón et al., 2012; Grunig and Grunig, 2008).
Linders (2012) examines the impact of social technologies on the relationship between citizens and government. He notes that social media allows for the reemergence of “coproduction” whereby citizens are seen as partners in the development, implementation, and maintenance of government services. He explores three modes of coproduction:
• Citizen Sourcing (C2G), which involves citizens providing government with information to improve services;
• Government as a Platform (G2C) in which the government provides data and/or infrastructure on which citizens can build services;
• Do It Yourself Government (C2C) in which citizens band together to carry out or augment functions with which governments are traditionally tasked.
Linders further examines these modes of coproduction in the contexts of three stages of service delivery: design, execution, and monitoring. This allows for the analysis of systems into a 3×3 typology that crosses the modes of coproduction with the stages of service. For example, citizen-sourcing projects in the design phase might involve sharing citizen opinions with the government, as with eRulemaking systems. Citizen sourcing projects in the execution phase might involve crowdsourcing, as with challenge.gov where the government posts challenges and asks the public to propose solutions. Citizen sourcing projects in the monitoring phase might involve feedback from citizens about government services, as with various FixMyStreet applications that have appeared in many cities (King and Brown, 2007; Maeda, Sekimoto, and Seto, 2016).
2.4 SMART CITIES, “CIVIC TECH,” AND URBAN INFORMATICS
At the current time, there is an emphasis on the concept of “smart cities.” The smart cities movement is an attempt to take advantage of the information generated by multiple independent data-producing activities within an environment in order to understand otherwise invisible interconnected processes. Naphade et al. (2011) characterize a smart city as a “system of systems” in which interdependent public and private systems share information with each other, and with metasystems, to provide an integrated overview for purposes of planning, management, and operational efficiency. Smart cities often rely on data-generating sensors and monitors in addition to modeling and visualization software. For example, a traffic planner might utilize GPS data from phones in cars, camera data on highway density, weather data generated by multiple stations, social media text generated by commuters, and a myriad of other diverse information sets to generate a view of current traffic conditions, which might then be made available to users in visualizations of various kinds for multiple purposes.
The term “civic technology” (Civic Tech) has emerged to describe grass-roots, citizen-inspired technology development for civic purposes. Boehner and DiSalvo (2016) note that the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has emphasized several aspects of the human side of computing technology in turn—including cognitive, followed by social, followed by cultural—and now may be turning to “civic.”
Foth et al. (2015b) argue that civic engagement has finally become a critical issue for HCI for the following reasons.
• Re-emergence of place: There has been a move from the technology-enabled erosion of distance to place-based media and engagement.
• Ubiquitous technology: The integration of information technologies with every aspect of people’s lives that have erased boundaries between the physical and digital city.
• People as producers: The ability for non-professionals to create content and design information systems encourages engagement that can have wide influence.
They specifically call out the technology trends of mobile/personal devices, broadband connectivity, open data, urban interfaces, and cloud computing as important in changing the outlook for civic engagement.
The Knight Foundation (Sotsky, 2013) identifies two overarching themes in civic tech: (1) Open Government; and (2) Community Action. Within each theme, several clusters were also described as follows:
• Open Government clusters:
° Data Access and Transparency
° Data Utility
° Public Decision Making
° Resident Feedback
° Visualization and Mapping
° Voting
• Community Action clusters:
° Civic Crowdfunding
° Community Organizing
° Information Crowdsourcing
° Neighborhood Forums
° Peer-to-Peer Sharing
The Knight Foundation study found lower investment being placed in the Open Government clusters of voting, public decision-making, and resident feedback, and the Community Action cluster of civic crowdfunding. During the two-and-a-half-year study beginning in 2011, the most money was being invested in peer-to-peer sharing and neighborhood forum development, with this money coming primarily from private capital and not grant funding. Grant funding was supporting projects primarily in the data utility, data access and transparency, and resident feedback clusters. More generally, Open Government initiatives were not supported by private investors, who instead preferred Community Action projects.
In reflecting on interviews with several civic tech innovators in the Atlanta area, Boehner and DiSalvo (2016) found that there was a move toward what they referred to as “Google-style” apps, or apps that emphasized search by information seekers instead of structure by information providers. This emphasis on supporting exploration instead of information design may have many implications for the flattening of governmental bureaucracies or procedures and the relationship between “data holders” and “data seekers.”
The rise of urbanization and the concurrent spread of ubiquitous networked information technologies has given rise to a new area often called “urban informatics” (Foth, Choi, and Satchell, 2011). As the name implies, urban informatics deals with cities and has place as a central component of its professional identity, although place is considered both physically and digitally (Foth, 2009). Urban informatics as a discipline supports efforts to expose and utilize information to urban planners in addition to citizens who wish to influence and understand the environment in which they live and to engage with others in creating an urban community.
Foth (2017) distinguishes between “bird’s-eye view” versus “street view” applications in the space of urban informatics. A bird’s-eye view is a top-down approach often advocated by administrators in the service model of government in which digital government spaces are designed for citizens, whereas a street view is a community-centric approach empowering people to create their own urban spaces. The distinction is intended to emphasize citizens as active participants in creating civic space, and indeed to re-conceptualize the city as an interface environment between individuals and their physical spaces via ubiquitous computing (de Waal, 2014; Foth et al., 2015b).
2.5 HYPERLOCAL SOCIAL MEDIA
After the emergence of social media, development of community portals diminished precipitously. A collection of special purpose review and recommendation sites, for example restaurant review sites, took the place of the services sections of portals. Social media took the place of the discussion forums and bulletin boards that had been so carefully crafted, curated, and studied. This move, however, also resulted in a loss of the local, neighborhood-level quality of portals since service recommender and rating sites typically operate at a national or global level. Similarly, the most widely used social media platforms never implemented neighborhood-level, or even physical-space based networks, although it is possible to create them. Neighborhood-oriented social networks such as NextDoor have not seen the same kind of explosive adoption as sites like Yelp! in the recommender space, or Facebook in the social media space, or Twitter in the microblogging space have seen.
Nonetheless, some neighborhood and community networks have developed in the current digital environment. Known as “hyperlocal” social spaces, these can take multiple forms, including social media sites, Twitter handles, image sharing sites, and other forms. In contrast to the goals of many social media sites, hyperlocal social media is intended to be geographically bounded, connecting people who live together and presumably, therefore, have common concerns related to their neighborhood.
Masden et al. (2014) studied NextDoor, a relatively new, neighborhood-based social media environment currently deployed across the U.S. They contrast NextDoor with the earliest community network systems such as BEV, and note that it is one of the first nationwide, top-down efforts to support local social networking. BEV and other networks discussed at the beginning of this chapter all evolved from within their communities. They also point out that NextDoor finds a place in an already existing “civic media ecosystem” consisting of all other social media, and thus needs to provide affordances for a different type of local neighborhood experience. Their findings suggested that NextDoor was utilized by members of a community who already interacted more frequently than average. It was used along with other social media applications, however it was perceived as being more formal and serious than other social media and hence less prone to trolling and incivility. Because users are identified and live in proximity to each other, they did feel constrained in what they could post, citing concerns about privacy and trust. While the geographical boundaries did result in discussions of neighborhood issues, in contrast to other topics, they also hindered discussion of matters that concerned larger geographical areas (e.g., traffic).
Another approach to hyperlocal social media is to extract locally relevant information from social media feeds and present this filtered information to users. The goal of such systems, as with all community networks, is to create greater community awareness and involvement. However, in this approach the assumption is made that relevant local information is present in the larger stream of social media information and thus the goal is to find it and present it selectively to users within their communities. This has been a theme in several efforts, including LiveHoods to mine tweets and foursquare checkins as a way of modeling urban activity patterns (Cranshaw et al., 2012), CiVicinity for aggregating multiple social media sources (Carroll et al., 2015; Hoffman et al., 2012), Virtual Town Square (VTS) for local news aggregation (Kavanaugh et al., 2014), and Whoo.ly for extracting and summarizing local tweets (Hu, Farnham, and Monroy-Hernández, 2013).
The development of Whoo.ly provides a good example of how a hyperlocal system might be developed in a user-centered manner. The researchers first examined how community members use existing local information sources. They found that most community members are information consumers, not producers; that many people are local information pushers, usually via retweets; that some individuals become local information hubs and acquire many followers; and that people desire information passed along from other community members even when it is otherwise available through local news, blogs, and other sources. An examination of tweets relevant to local matters (in Seattle) revealed the following top ten categories in decreasing frequency:
• Neighborhood affirmations (bragging about the neighborhood)
• Business updates
• News
• Recommendations
• Civic activity
• Ads
• Social events
• Crime/Road reports
• Deals and coupons
• Talks and classes
This information allowed the designers to understand their potential users and the types of information that users would be hoping to see in a hyperlocal community tweet collection. Whoo.ly extracts local events, top local topics, active local people, and popular local places from Twitter and presents summaries to users in the relevant locality. An evaluation of Whoo.ly found that it was easier to use than the main Twitter feed and most useful to people who were not already skilled in Twitter filtering. They also found, however, that many users wished for more personalization and that providing all information about the locality was still something of an information overload issue.
CiVicinity (see Carroll et al., 2015 for an overview) provides another example of participatory development of a hyperlocal civic information aggregator. CiVicinity combined multiple sources of local information, including unusual sources such as electronic calendar entries and users’ annotated photographs. The latter provide snapshots of smaller, more personal activities, which may enhance the sense of community engagement. The developers refer to this as “superthresholding,” and compare it to small, neighborly acts such as commenting on the weather or showing someone a picture of a family member. The CiVicinity interface mixed maps, calendars, news, events, and stories. Formative evaluation showed that individuals found this integration of material provided a more comprehensive and cohesive information environment. There was some evidence that local news was perceived as being more important when presented in the community portal.
2.6 SUMMARY
We have traced the development of community networks from their inception, as listservs and portals designed and curated by community leaders; through the digital city metaphor; to the establishment of official e-government portals and services; to the smart city enabled by ubiquitous sensors and open data; and finally, to the rise of hyperlocal applications that mine the continuous and massive stream of user-generated and un-curated social media. While this reflects an evolution of technologies, it can also be seen as a change in the perception of what a digitally augmented community should be. Instead of being simply a provider of information and services, social media enabled the development of a community of discourse and, ultimately, a new definition of place.
