The Role of Pseudonymity in Mobile e-Participation

In addition to lack of knowledge and trust in official authorities, privacy concerns are among the reasons for non-participation in public discourse. Mitigating these barriers is important when aiming to promote and ultimately increase public participation. Through the lens of a long-term field study with a mobile participation prototype, this research investigated citizens\u27 participation patterns in relation to their choice in username (real name vs. pseudonym). Our data suggests that while engagement served less socializing purposes, social appreciation was not affected by pseudonymity. Interestingly, those participating with their real-name lost trust in the local government. Overall, we found no evidence that pseudonymity impacts the level of participation, but participants indicated to favor using a pseudonym in the future

Experiences from a Living Lab trialling a mobile participation platform

The project b-Part adresses the currently low level of participation by introducing and evaluating a novel participation prototype utilizing contemporary mobile technology. As pervasive participation methods eliminate spatial and temporal barriers, it is anticipated that people are more inclined to engage in decision-making processes than with traditional forms (e.g. townhall meetings). Based on these considerations we developed a mobile participation platform that was evaluated in a real-world scenario over the duration of five months. This paper describes our methodology focusing on the conducted Living Lab and reports on experiences made during the runtime of the project. We hereby distinguish between experiences made by citizens and the authorites’ view on the whole participatory process. Our findings show that there is a high acceptance of mobile participation methods among citizens and they want to have it developed even further. On the other hand, although city administration is often enthusiastic about novel participation formats, there are still challenges to meet regarding the definition of suitable topics for participation, a match between needs of citizens and city officials, the mapping of organisational responsibilities and long-term commitment to active participation

Ad hoc communities on the road: Serendipitous social encounters to enhance tourist experiences

Driving can be a lonely activity. While there has been a lot of research and technical inventions concerning car-to-car communication and passenger entertainment, there is still little work concerning connecting drivers. Whereas tourism is very much a social activity, drive tourists and road trippers have few options to communicate with fellow travelers. Our study is placed at the intersection of tourism and driving. It aims to enhance the trip experience during driving through social interaction. This paper explores how a mobile application that allows instant messaging between travelers sharing similar context can establish a temporary, ad hoc community and enhance the road trip experience. A prototype was developed and evaluated in various user and field studies. The study’s outcomes are relevant for the design of future mobile tourist guides that benefit from community design, social encounters and recommendations

Inclusive Gamified Participation: Who are we inviting and who becomes engaged?

Recent evaluations have shown that up until now, e-participation platforms have not been very effective in involving citizens in public decision-making. This is partly due to these novel forms of engagement not seeming to reach citizens beyond the usual suspects of public participation. A trending approach to make these platforms more attractive, especially for less involved social groups, is to incorporate game-like elements. This research investigates the influence of demographical variables on participation and motivation when using a mobile gamified participation application. Our results show that participation was affected by age. The data further suggests that youth is both interested in urban planning and welcomes mobile participation forms, whereas older individuals feel less invited by novel technologies and engage less. Yet, older individuals and those less enthusiastic about games were not entirely put off by the included game elements

Serendipitous road trips: Enhancing tourists’ experiences through social interaction

Driving can be a lonely activity. While there has been a lot of research and technical inventions concerning car-to-car communication and passenger entertainment, there is still little work concerning connecting drivers. Whereas tourism is very much a social activity, drive tourists have few options to communicate with fellow travellers. The proposed project is placed at the intersection of tourism and driving and aims to enhance the trip experience during driving through social interaction. This thesis explores how a mobile application that allows instant messaging between travellers sharing similar context can add to road trip experiences. To inform the design of such an application, the project adopted the principle of the user-centred design process. User needs were assessed by running an ideation workshop and a field trip. Findings of both studies have shown that tourists have different preferences and diverse attitudes towards contacting new people. Yet all participants stressed the value of social recommendations. Based on those results and a later expert review, three prototype versions of the system were created. A prototyping session with potential end users highlighted the most important features including the possibility to view user profiles, choose between text and audio input and receive up-to-date information. An implemented version of the prototype was evaluated in an exploratory study to identify usability related problems in an actual use case scenario as well as to find implementation bugs. The outcomes of this research are relevant for the design of future mobile tourist guides that leverage from benefits of social recommendations

Playing (with) Democracy: A Review of Gamified Participation Approaches

Albeit a wide range of e-participation platforms being already available, the level of public participation remains low. Governments around the world as well as academia are currently exploring new ways to design participation methods that are more engaging to use and will foster participation. One of the strategies is gamification. By adding game elements to e-participation platforms it is hoped to motivate for citizens to engage. This paper reviewed a large number of e-participation platforms, seeking to provide an overview of the current state of the art of so-called gamified participation initiatives. Our results show that while about half of the review projects can be categorized as game-related, only a small amount employs gamification. Moreover, current gamified participation initiatives seem to focus on reward-based gamification, a strategy which is said to come with risks. In this paper we further provide recommendations for future gamified participation projects

Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age

In this paper, four early career researchers discuss and reflect upon the unique research space offered by Smart City projects. We do so in an attempt to publicly reconcile some of the tensions and difficulties that we encountered while collaborating across organisational boundaries during three "Smart City" projects, which we briefly outline in the paper. We focus our discussion on four types of tensions that we encountered: motivations; accountability; participation, and; qualifying success. We believe that the tensions we encountered in our projects, and that we discuss in this paper, might be experienced similarly by other early career researchers. By sharing our tensions, raising our questions, and proposing some preliminary answers to those questions based on our experiences and reflections, we hope to provoke a discussion amongst our dg.o peers that will lead to improved future collaborations, a supportive community environment and, ultimately, smoother Smart City research projects.</p

Investigating the User Experience of Smartphone Authentication Schemes - The Role of the Mobile Context

Today’s smartphones feature several authentication methods not only to protect the overall device but also to control access to mobile banking and commerce apps, for example. However, to date there is no clear understanding on how users perceive different authentication methods in light of different usage contexts. To close this gap, we report on a study (N=22) in which we compared four recent authentication schemes on Android devices (Face Unlock, fingerprint scanning, NFC ring and PIN) in four different mobile settings (private vs. public, moving vs. stationary). We found that Fingerprint scanning turned out to be a well-suited and accepted authentication scheme over all four investigated contexts. While the NFC-based ring authentication is seen as less suitable for private settings, Face Unlock is disliked for public settings