Insight
An increasing number of smartphone applications to engage and involve citizens in urban government is available and enables mobile participation on-the-go. However, mobile participation apps are often restricted to
pure one-way reporting of issues by citizens and thus more strategic long-term participation is not supported. This issue is addressed with the pervasive game Community Circles that foster long-term engagement of citizens to participate.
Idea
Community Circles is a location-based mobile game and e-participation platform that aims to motivate citizens to actively participate and discuss urban topics. In the game, citizens create geo-referenced contributions (ideas, issues, opinions & polls). Each contribution has an impact area that grows with its activity and can merge into communities. Further, each contribution has a lifetime, which can be extended due to the activity. The long-term goal is to grow and keep communities alive.
Implementation
The game consists of a functional hybrid mobile app and a backend server. A mobile client is available on iOS and Android using Ionic as a hybrid UI framework while the backend is built with Djano and PostGIS that provides a REST interface.
Impact
The concept was evaluated during a game trial involving real users.
This work has been carried out within the interdisciplinary research project b-Part, in cooperation with the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW) A work-in-progress poster was presented at the CHI’14 conference in Toronto, Canada. Further information is online at https://archive.ulrichlehner.com/cc.b-part.eu/.