From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen

Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites,have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is availablefor mobile phones, where it can be integrated with such device-specific features as sensors and GPS.From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen examines how this increasingly open, collaborative, andpersonalizable technology is shaping not just our social interactions but new kinds of civicengagement with cities, communities, and spaces. It offers analyses and studies from around theworld that explore how the power of social technologies can be harnessed for social engagement inurban areas. Chapters by leading researchers in the emerging field of urban informatics outline thetheoretical context of their inquiries, describing a new view of the city as a hybrid that mergesdigital and physical worlds; examine technology-aided engagement involving issues of food, theenvironment, and sustainability; explore the creative use of location-based mobile technology incities from Melbourne, Australia, to Dhaka, Bangladesh; study technological innovations forimproving civic engagement; and discuss design research approaches for understanding the developmentof sentient real-time cities, including interaction portals and robots.

Marcus Foth, Founder and Director of the Urban Informatics Research Lab, is Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. Laura Forlano is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University. Christine Satchell is Senior Research Fellow at the Urban Informatics Research Lab. Martin Gibbs is a Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.