The Design of Everyday Things
(Hyper) local news aggregation: designing for social affordances
Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research
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Traditional sources of information for small and rural communities have been disappearing over the past decade. A lot of the information and discussion related to such local geographic areas is now scattered across websites of numerous local organizations, individual blogs, social media and other user-generated media (YouTube, Flickr). It is important to capture this information and make it easily accessible to local citizens to facilitate citizen engagement and social interaction. Furthermore, a system that has location-based support can provide local citizens with an engaging way to interact with this information and identify the local issues most relevant to them. A location-based interface for a local geographic area enables people to identify and discuss local issues related to specific locations such as a particular street or a road construction site. We created an information aggregator, called the Virtual Town Square (VTS), to support and facilitate local discussion and interaction. We created a location-based interface for users to access the information collected by VTS. In this paper, we discuss focus group interviews with local citizens that motivated our design of a local news and information aggregator to facilitate civic participation. We then discuss the unique design challenges in creating such a local news aggregator and our design approach to create a local information ecosystem. We describe VTS and the initial evaluation and feedback we received from local users and through weekly meetings with community partners.