Aug 5, 2012

Coye Cheshire Discusses Participatory Civic-Minded Apps in the Contra Costa Times

From the Contra Costa Times

Civic-minded apps helping Bay Area communities

By Angela Woodall

Several years ago, Oakland resident Asiya Wadud started noticing fruit going to waste in the backyards of neighbors. She made a list of the addresses where trees needed harvesting and later expanded to a hand-drawn map and a blog called Forage Oakland. Her goal was to create a community of neighbors who got to know each other over a bartered basket of Santa Rosa plums or Fuju persimmons.

"It just began to grow organically from that," Wadud said. Then she hit a wall. She wanted to expand the project but didn't have enough people to do all the organizing and harvesting.

A friend connected her to Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab, whose teenage interns helped develop ForageCity.com with assistance from UC Berkeley students and a private consultant. The online and mobile app lets users find and share food automatically. It's still in the early "beta" stage of development. And commercial apps produced by Silicon Valley companies like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram continue to dominate the tech scene for many users. But armed with low-cost phones and an Internet connection, people are using civic-minded apps like ForageCity to tackle everything from public safety to potholes....

The low cost, inclusive nature of today's technology has "changed the landscape," said Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, where he studies social interactions online and off.

The most successful apps allow users to see the impact they are having in their community, Cheshire said. The developers, he added, try to understand users' motivations in both the short term — why contribute — and the long-term — what do we gain as a community from our contributions and how does it align with our values and ideology?...

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016