Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
Traditional sources of information for small and rural communities have been disappearing over the past decade. A lot of the information and discussion related to such areas is now scattered across websites of numerous local organizations, individual blogs, social media and other user-generated media (YouTube, Flickr). To facilitate citizen engagement and social interaction it is important to capture this information and make it easily accessible. A system with location-based support can provide local citizens with an engaging way to interact with information and identify the local issues most relevant to them, such as a road construction site. We created an information aggregator, called the Virtual Town Square (VTS), to support and facilitate local discussion. It supports a location-based interface for users to access the information collected. In this paper, we discuss focus group interviews with local citizens that motivated our design of a system to facilitate civic participation. We then discuss the unique design challenges of a local news aggregator and our design approach to create a local information ecosystem. We also describe the initial evaluation and feedback we received from local users. We close the paper with a discussion of future changes to VTS to address its initial limitations.
Information Polity – IOS Press
Published: Jan 1, 2014
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.