Supporting Participation and Mobile Interactions in Community Events
Open Access
- Author:
- Xie, Xiaoyan
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- September 04, 2009
- Committee Members:
- John Millar Carroll, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
John Millar Carroll, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- prototyping
event support systems
community events
blogging
awareness - Abstract:
- In the past ten years, the broadband wireless networks have been considerably developed. Many cities throughout the world have been investing in or are planning on a pervasive wireless infrastructure with the goal of making wireless access to the Internet a universal service. The development of local public network infrastructures has raised a new challenge for the community networking research tradition. How can we leverage the new capabilities of a pervasive wireless network, such as ubiquitous accessibility, interaction immediacy, mobility, and location sensibility, to support community-oriented goals? What are examples of effective civic applications of public wireless infrastructures? Although some work has addressed leveraging wireless applications for the capacity building of geographically collocated communities (such as cities, towns, and other relatively populated areas), few of them investigate the wireless application paradigms for community-oriented goals by actual design, prototyping, and evaluation. The work reported in this thesis is a pilot study to address this gap, by which we explore what application features, leveraging the capacities of pervasive wireless infrastructures, can be used to facilitate and/or foster attendance of and interaction at community events, and how to design them. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and two field trials of a prototyping system supporting community event attendees and discusses design implications drawn from the field trials.