Locast Civic Media: Extending Civic Engagement Boundaries through Mobile Media and Hyper-Local Conversations

Always-on connectivity, video production capabilities, social networking, and location-based services make mobile phones important tools for citizen journalism. Drawing on emerging patterns, our research focuses on transposing global media production and circulation practices to local contexts. Our emphasis is on joining urban conversations with civic knowledge sharing practices to build information-based communities. We present an integrated, ubiquitous, mobile media and geo-social networking platform that proposes tools for open-publication, collaborative-authoring, and production. This framework allows social content dissemination through mobile devices and the web. In this paper, we discuss our recent findings from research on mobile civic media, presenting our design methods, implementation details, and a field study arranged in Porto Alegre (Brazil). Finally, we discuss our insights and future design considerations for platform development.