Many projects have looked at how communities can co-design shared online repositories, such as Wikimapia and Wikipedia. However, little work has examined how local communities can give advice and support to their members by creating context-aware reminders that may include advice, tips and small requests. We developed the Community Reminder environment, a smartphone-based platform that supports community members to design and use context-aware reminders. We have conducted a one-month field study of Community Reminder to crowdsource and deliver safety-relevant information in a local community. The results show the benefits of involving community members in reminder design and connecting different perspectives. We also show that the proposed approach can broaden participation in local communities.
Mobile crowdsourcing allows people to collect data using a large pool of participants. In this paper, we focus on mobile crowdsourcing for citizens to solve local issues in context. We argue that such crowdsourcing environments need to support exploration, a continuous, opportunistic, and multi-perspective process that existing crowd sensing systems cannot easily support. We have developed a system called Context Weaver, which connect participants using networked mobile devices in order to support collaborative exploration, and conducted field trials to understand the effect of networking participants in the crowdsourced data-collection activities that encompass planning, execution, and analysis phases. We discuss a methodology for exploratory mobile crowdsourcing by citizens based on the provision of mutual awareness and rapid feedback in context. The proposed methodology can provide a basis for a model of networked mobile crowdsourcing which can exploit not only the man-power but also the creativity of citizens to gather relevant data.
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