research-article

Seek and Reflect: A Mobile Scavenger Hunt to Develop Community Engagement

Authors:

Tiffany Knearem,

John M. CarrollAuthors Info & Claims

C&T '21: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech

Pages 212 - 223

https://doi.org/10.1145/3461564.3461573

Published: 21 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Fostering a sense of connection to a place and building relations between residents are goals of community engagement. Engagement doesn’t have to be serious, rather it can be playful and casual. Periodic local festivals bring communities together and provide context for introducing information and communication technology (ICT) for community engagement. We report on a mobile scavenger hunt app released during a local festival, to understand how it facilitated community engagement. We interviewed 15 app users about their community experiences and how the app supported them to engage with various aspects of the festival and host community. We found that the app augmented community engagement through increased place attachment, an awareness of neighbors, seeking out new experiences, and providing opportunities for reflecting on historic events. We suggest that mobile ICTs for community engagement be entertaining and flexible, and leverage both online and offline activities to get people engaged in their community.

References

[1]

2021. Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. Retrieved April 28, 2021 from https://arts-festival.com/

[2]

John M Carroll. 2014. The neighborhood in the Internet: Design research projects in community informatics. Routledge.

[3]

John M Carroll, Jordan Beck, Shipi Dhanorkar, Jomara Binda, Srishti Gupta, and Haining Zhu. 2018. Strengthening community data: towards pervasive participation. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age. 1–9.

Digital Library

[4]

John M Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson. 1996. Developing the Blacksburg electronic village. Commun. ACM 39, 12 (1996), 69–74.

Digital Library

[5]

John M Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson. 2013. Wild at home: The neighborhood as a living laboratory for HCI. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 20, 3(2013), 1–28.

Digital Library

[6]

John M Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, Philip Isenhour, Craig Ganoe, Dan Dunlap, James Fogarty, Wendy Schafer, and Christina Van Metre. 2001. Designing our town: MOOsburg. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 54, 5 (2001), 725–751.

Digital Library

[7]

Alan Chamberlain, Andy Crabtree, Tom Rodden, Matt Jones, and Yvonne Rogers. 2012. Research in the wild: understanding’in the wild’approaches to design and development. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference. 795–796.

Digital Library

[8]

Ruby CM Chau. 2007. The involvement of Chinese older people in policy and practice. Aspirations and expectations. York, UK: Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2007).

[9]

David M Chavis and Abraham Wandersman. 2002. Sense of community in the urban environment: A catalyst for participation and community development. In A Quarter Century of Community Psychology. Springer, 265–292.

[10]

Jiawei Chen, Benjamin V Hanrahan, and John M Carroll. 2019. Withshare: A Mobile Application to Support Community Coproduction Activities. International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (IJMHCI) 11, 1(2019), 40–61.

[11]

Jiawei Chen, Benjamin V Hanrahan, Chien Wen Yuan, and John M Carroll. 2018. Capturing community in mobility: Mobile methods for community informatics. Mobile Media & Communication 6, 2 (2018), 163–178.

[12]

Keith Cheverst, Paul Coulton, William Bamford, and Nick Taylor. 2008. Supporting (mobile) user experience at a rural village ’scarecrow festival’: a formative study of a geolocated photo mashup utilising a situated display. Mobile Interaction in the Real World(2008).

[13]

Ros Derrett. 2003. Making sense of how festivals demonstrate a community’s sense of place. Event Management 8, 1 (2003), 49–58.

[14]

Barney G Glaser and Anselm L Strauss. 2017. Discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Routledge.

[15]

Mark S Granovetter. 1973. The strength of weak ties. American journal of sociology 78, 6 (1973), 1360–1380.

[16]

Michael Gurstein. 2007. What is community informatics (and why does it matter)? Vol. 2. Polimetrica sas.

[17]

Kyungsik Han, Patrick C Shih, Mary Beth Rosson, and John M Carroll. 2014. Enhancing community awareness of and participation in local heritage with a mobile application. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing. ACM, 1144–1155.

Digital Library

[18]

Kyungsik Han, Richard Wirth, Benjamin V Hanrahan, Jiawei Chen, Sooyeon Lee, and John M Carroll. 2016. Being connected to the local community through a festival mobile application. IConference 2016 Proceedings(2016).

[19]

Cecilia Henning and Mats Lieberg. 1996. Strong ties or weak ties? Neighbourhood networks in a new perspective. Scandinavian Housing and planning research 13, 1 (1996), 3–26.

[20]

Giulio Jacucci, Antti Oulasvirta, Tommi Ilmonen, John Evans, and Antti Salovaara. 2007. Comedia: mobile group media for active spectatorship. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1273–1282.

Digital Library

[21]

Catherine Emma Kate Jones, Stathis Theodosis, and Ioanna Lykourentzou. 2019. The Enthusiast, the Interested, the Sceptic, and the Cynic: Understanding User Experience and Perceived Value in Location-Based Cultural Heritage Games Through Qualitative and Sentiment Analysis. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) 12, 1 (2019), 6.

[22]

Jenny Lee, Gerard Kyle, and David Scott. 2012. The mediating effect of place attachment on the relationship between festival satisfaction and loyalty to the festival hosting destination. Journal of travel research 51, 6 (2012), 754–767.

[23]

Maria Lewicka. 2005. Ways to make people active: The role of place attachment, cultural capital, and neighborhood ties. Journal of environmental psychology 25, 4 (2005), 381–395.

[24]

Sarah Lindström and Mårten Pettersson. 2010. Supporting ad-hoc re-planning and shareability at large-scale events. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work. ACM, 245–252.

Digital Library

[25]

Larry Lyon and Robyn Driskell. 2011. The community in urban society. Waveland Press.

[26]

Lynne C Manzo and Douglas D Perkins. 2006. Finding common ground: The importance of place attachment to community participation and planning. Journal of planning literature 20, 4 (2006), 335–350.

[27]

François Matarasso. 1997. Use or ornament. The social impact of participation in the arts 4, 2 (1997).

[28]

David W McMillan and David M Chavis. 1986. Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of community psychology 14, 1 (1986), 6–23.

[29]

Peter Peltonen, Antti Salovaara, Giulio Jacucci, Tommi Ilmonen, Carmelo Ardito, Petri Saarikko, and Vikram Batra. 2007. Extending large-scale event participation with user-created mobile media on a public display. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. ACM, 131–138.

Digital Library

[30]

Jennifer Preece and Ben Shneiderman. 2009. The reader-to-leader framework: Motivating technology-mediated social participation. AIS transactions on human-computer interaction 1, 1(2009), 13–32.

[31]

Robert D Putnam. 2000. Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. In Culture and politics. Springer, 223–234.

[32]

Robert D Putnam 2000. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon and schuster.

[33]

Elizabeth Roberts. 1996. Place and spirit in public land management. Nature and the human spirit: Toward an expanded land management ethic (1996), 61–78.

[34]

Wendy A Schafer, Craig H Ganoe, and John M Carroll. 2007. Supporting community emergency management planning through a geocollaboration software architecture. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 16, 4-5 (2007), 501–537.

[35]

Gill Seyfang. 2003. Growing cohesive communities one favour at a time: social exclusion, active citizenship and time banks. International Journal of urban and regional Research 27, 3 (2003), 699–706.

[36]

Patrick C Shih, Kyungsik Han, and John M Carroll. 2015. Engaging community members with digitally curated social media content at an arts festival. In 2015 Digital Heritage, Vol. 1. IEEE, 321–324.

[37]

Anna Stefaniak, Michał Bilewicz, and Maria Lewicka. 2017. The merits of teaching local history: Increased place attachment enhances civic engagement and social trust. Journal of environmental psychology 51 (2017), 217–225.

[38]

Sarah-Kristin Thiel and Ulrich Lehner. 2015. Exploring the effects of game elements in m-participation. In Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference. ACM, 65–73.

Digital Library

[39]

Tom Tyler and Steven Blader. 2013. Cooperation in groups: Procedural justice, social identity, and behavioral engagement. Psychology press.

[40]

Xiying Wang, Tiffany Knearem, Han Jun Yoon, Hedgie Jo, Jackeline Lee, Junwoo Seo, and John M Carroll. 2019. Engaging the Community Through Places: An User Study of People’s Festival Stories. In International Conference on Information. Springer, 315–326.

[41]

Stanley Waterman. 1998. Carnivals for elites? The cultural politics of arts festivals. Progress in human geography 22, 1 (1998), 54–74.

[42]

Juliette Wilson, Norin Arshed, Eleanor Shaw, and Tobias Pret. 2017. Expanding the domain of festival research: A review and research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews 19, 2 (2017), 195–213.

[43]

Anna Marie Ziersch and FE Baum. 2004. Involvement in civil society groups: Is it good for your health?Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 58, 6 (2004), 493–500.

Cited By

Honda KItoga CHattori A(2025)Fostering Attachment to the Community by Discovering of Local Resources Using Location-Based System2025 19th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (IMCOM)10.1109/IMCOM64595.2025.10857560(1-7)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/IMCOM64595.2025.10857560
Carter AMontague KTalhouk RLawson SNicolau HPires ARohde MDel Bue AKnearem T(2024)DCitizens Roles Unveiled: SIG Navigating Identities in Digital Civics and the Spectrum of Societal ImpactExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3643981(1-5)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3643981
Hamm AUllrich ARehak RBecker KNölting B(2023)Municipalities’ digitalization and sustainability transformations: A network approach for designing a transdisciplinary knowledge communityProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3593743.3593780(174-179)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593743.3593780
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Community Acknowledgment: Engaging Community Members in Volunteer Acknowledgment
GROUP

Volunteers in non-profit groups are a valuable workforce that contributes to economic development and supports people in need in the U.S. However, many non-profit groups face challenges including engaging and sustaining volunteer participation, as well ...
Department Programs to Encourage and Support Service Learning and Community Engagement
ITiCSE '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

Service Learning (SL) is an established practice in which course objectives are met by having students engage in activities with individuals and/or organizations within the community in a way that is mutually beneficial to both the student and the ...
Understanding community participation and engagement in open source software Projects: A systematic mapping study
Abstract
In the Open Source Software (OSS) paradigm, developers along with users form a community for an OSS project as they share an interest in using/developing the project. Active community engagement is essential for an OSS project to ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

C&T '21: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech

June 2021

345 pages

ISBN:9781450390569

DOI:10.1145/3461564

Editors:
Florian Cech
University of Stuttgart, Germany
,
Shelly Farnham
University of Stuttgart, Germany

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 June 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

C&T '21

C&T '21: Communities & Technologies 2021

June 20 - 25, 2021

WA, Seattle, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 183 submissions, 44%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

7
Total Citations
View Citations
274
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)77
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10

Reflects downloads up to 01 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Honda KItoga CHattori A(2025)Fostering Attachment to the Community by Discovering of Local Resources Using Location-Based System2025 19th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (IMCOM)10.1109/IMCOM64595.2025.10857560(1-7)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/IMCOM64595.2025.10857560
Carter AMontague KTalhouk RLawson SNicolau HPires ARohde MDel Bue AKnearem T(2024)DCitizens Roles Unveiled: SIG Navigating Identities in Digital Civics and the Spectrum of Societal ImpactExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3643981(1-5)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3643981
Hamm AUllrich ARehak RBecker KNölting B(2023)Municipalities’ digitalization and sustainability transformations: A network approach for designing a transdisciplinary knowledge communityProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3593743.3593780(174-179)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593743.3593780
Carroll JGui FGupta SKnearem T(2022)Playful Meaning-Making as Prosocial FunFuture Internet10.3390/fi1410028814:10(288)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14100288
Bentvelzen MWoźniak PHerbes PStefanidi ENiess J(2022)Revisiting Reflection in HCIProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35172336:1(1-27)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517233
Browne JGreen L(2022)The Future of Work is No Work: A Call to Action for Designers in the Abolition of WorkCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts10.1145/3491101.3516385(1-8)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491101.3516385
Paraschivoiu ILayer-Wagner T(2021)Placemaking for Urban SustainabilityExtended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3450337.3483482(186-191)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3450337.3483482

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten