Engaging citizens with news stories through social curation: a design research project

Abstract

We report on our design of Acropolis, a social computing platform that allows citizens to build and share their own narratives about long-running news stories of political nature. A key goal of this research project is to explore the following design opportunity: how can we re-design news stories in order to engage citizens in their reading and curation? We have hypothesized that one way of achieving this goal would be by effectively supporting user-curated narratives, yet allowing users to socially engage in different perspectives and plots in a story. Using a research through design methodology, we conclude the first cycle of this study with a set of design recommendations for building similar platforms. Author Keywords social curation; user-curated narratives; crowdsourcing; design research; political stories; engagement with news ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3 Information Interfaces and Presentatio