Encouraging civic participation through local news aggregation

作     者：Kavanaugh, Andrea Krishnan, Siddarth Pérez-Quiñones, Manuel Tedesco, John Madondo, Kumbirai Ahuja, Ankit 

作者机构：Center for Human-Computer Interaction Virginia Tech Blacksurg VA United States Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech Blacksurg VA United States Department of Communication Studies Virginia Tech Blacksurg VA United States Department of Sociology Virginia Tech Blacksurg VA United States 

出 版 物：《Information Polity》 (Inf. Polity)

年 卷 期：2014年第19卷第1-2期

页      面：35-56页

学科分类：0303[法学-社会学] 0810[工学-信息与通信工程] 1205[管理学-图书情报与档案管理] 1204[管理学-公共管理] 0302[法学-政治学] 08[工学] 0811[工学-控制科学与工程] 0503[文学-新闻传播学] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：National Stroke Foundation  (SES-1111239) 

主　　题：Civic participation information aggregator local information 

摘      要：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. © 2014 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.