AppCivist - A Service-Oriented Software Platform for Socially Sustainable Activism

The increased adoption of mobile devices and social networking is drastically changing the way people monitor and share knowledge about their environment. Here, information and communication technologies (ICT) offer significant new ways to support social activism in cities by providing residents with new digital tools to articulate projects and mobilize activities. However, the development of ICT for activism is still in its infancy, with activists using basic tools stitched together in an ad hoc manner for their needs. Still, Internet-based technologies and related software architectures feature various enablers for civic action beyond base social networking. To that end, this paper discusses the vision and initial details of AppCivist, a platform that builds on cross-domain research among social scientists and computer scientists to revisit service-oriented architecture and relevant services to further social activism. We discuss the ICT challenges inherent in this project and present our recent work to address them.