The experienced "sense" of a virtual community: characteristics and processes
ACM SIGMIS Database
Competition Among Virtual Communities and User Valuation: The Case of Investing-Related Communities
Information Systems Research
Supporting the sense of locality with online communities
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Entertainment and media in the ubiquitous era
Digital circles of support: Meeting the information needs of older people
Computers in Human Behavior
bumpy, caution with merging: an exploration of tagging in a geowiki
Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work
Adapting bureaucracy to the Internet. The case of Venice Local Government
Information Polity - The coming of age of e-government studies;papers from EGPA 2010
Geowiki + route analysis = improved transportation planning
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work companion
Using crowdsourcing to support pro-environmental community activism
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Probing bus stop for insights on transit co-design
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Crowd computing: a literature review and definition
Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference
Information Polity - ICT, public administration and democracy in the coming decade
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UK local governments have invested heavily in ICT in recent years to improve public service delivery. Most local governments now operate contact centres and websites to exchange information and transactions with citizens. But the aspirations of central government go much further - to service "transformation" - and the expectation that citizens and communities will be actively engaged in service design and delivery. In parallel with this new political agenda, technological developments are enabling users to create their own online fora, and to generate their own content. These fora often address public service areas, such as healthcare, crime and education. This paper presents an evaluation of one of the first citizen-driven systems for local public service improvement in the UK: FixMyStreet.com (FMS). The system enables citizens to report, view or discuss local problems such as graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs or street lighting, and to track their resolution by the local government concerned. The system went live in February 2007. FMS has attracted over 3000 problem reports and updates in its first six months, and is viewed very favourably by the citizens surveyed here. But many problems reported to the site remain "unfixed" with status "unknown". Local government officers voice a number of concerns: the site duplicates their own websites; they cannot report fixes directly to ensure the information is up-to-date; nor can they manage user expectations regarding service performance. And the site has no "sense of virtual community" (SOVC) [1], with individuals posting in isolation without the support of fellow citizens to amplify their voices or to contribute to problem resolution. The paper concludes by combining the concept of SOVC, factors identified as encouraging growth in online communities, and the example of a successful London community website, BRAIN, to suggest possible future developments for FMS and for public service fora in general.