Being connected to the local community through a Festival mobile application

Abstract

In this paper we report our investigation into how using and interacting with a local festival mobile app enhanced users' festival experiences and connected them to other local users and their community. We explored the relationship between users' perceived basic affordances of mobile technology, perceived opportunities of the festival app, and three elements that sustain the local community-attachment, engagement, and social support networks. Based on the usage logs of 348 active users, as well as survey responses from 80 users, we present a mobile-mediated local community framework and found that engagement is a key mediator of mobile experiences and facets of community.

Community Animation: Exploring a design space that leverages geosocial networking to increase community engagement

“…We began by designing three scenarios based on the three strategies that emerged from the research themes of previous research [15,17,20,27,28,33,32,40,43] that illustrated how each could be used to promote engagement with other members of the local community in geosocial networking apps. Our survey investigates which scenario will be most useful in achieving the community-centered activities necessary for the hypothesized contribution.…”

“…All survey questions asked the participants to indicate their level of agreement on a 10-point Likert scale, that varied from strongly disagree (value of 1) to strongly agree (value of 10) on what would be their perceived likelihood of downloading and using an app that supports the scenario. Scales to measure community-centered activities were adapted from questions used in community collective efficacy scales [18,19] and have since been abbreviated and used in previous literature [27,28,40] in this area (see Table 2).…”

Capturing community in mobility: Mobile methods for community informatics

“…ArtsFest (Han et al, 2016; Shih et al, 2015) is an app that supports a local arts festival, which is one of the largest annual local community events in a college town. The mobile application helps festival visitors easily access festival information and share their experiences with photos and comments, aiming to enrich the community event.…”

“…Instead, researchers can act on some seeding user behaviors to guide participants and encourage appropriation. The study of ArtsFest (Han et al, 2016; Shih et al, 2015) was staged in an actual community happening and the study context and the use of the mobile technology were ephemeral, restricted to the duration of the festival. Leveraging a local community event, such as a municipal planning session (Korn & Bødker, 2012) or a festival in ArtsFest’s case, as the study context is an effective approach for community informatics research.…”

“…In order to elaborate the design and procedures of scripted field experiment for capturing and understanding community in mobility, we introduce and discuss the research methods in four mobile community projects: Lost State College (Han, Shih, Rosson, & Carroll, 2014a), Mobile Timebank (Han, Shih, Bellotti, & Carroll, 2015), ArtsFest (Han et al, 2016; Shih, Han, & Carroll, 2015), and WithShare (Carroll, Chen, Yuan, & Hanrahan, 2016). These projects studied the impacts of four different mobile applications on various aspects of community awareness and participation.…”