A We-Centric Service for Mobile Police Officers to Support Communication in Ad-Hoc Groups

Abstract

We-centric services are meant to stimulate and facilitate people to communicate and cooperate with others in dynamic or ad-hoc groups. Typically, a we-centric service provides hints and reasons to contact others, and, because these other people receive similar hints and reasons, stimulates and facilitates people to experience "we". The paper describes the development and evaluation of one we-centric service prototype for police officers. We found that key-issues related to developing we-centric services are (1) finding the proper context elements and information sources to take into account when searching for relevant others, (2) presenting the people found and the context of those people in an appropriate way, i.e. with clear explanations and information on their current availability and (3) supporting reciprocal relationships.