Locast Civic Media
Enabling citizenship playing an active role in the process of information creation, distribution and democratic access through mobile media.
Locast Overview from MIT Mobile Experience Lab.
Locast - Civic Engagement from MIT Mobile Experience Lab.
Locast - Categories of Involvement from MIT Mobile Experience Lab.
Locast Civic Media is a mobile & web platform to engage citizenship in the process of collecting, reporting and disseminating news and information related to the urban environment. In particular, a mobile application enables the user to create street reports (casts) through video and audio content and decide whether to produce them individually or to involve peers in larger-scale reports on a specific topic and/or urban area (projects). Casts and projects are created, collected and shared in real-time on Locast website where the entire members’ community can join the conversation with comments and further casts.
The proposed research project aims at exploring location-based civic media as a tool to enhance local inhabitants' awareness of events and social dynamics taking place around them. More importantly, we plan to observe those dynamics that enable the local citizens to actively participate and engage the community in the reporting of these events through Locast. The main objective of the project is to understand how mobile social networks could impact the city, its media representation and help people to stay informed, socialized, and participate actively in the media production process.
This participatory media experiment will enlist the support of students of the Media Communications Department (FAMECOS) at PUCRS that will be protagonists as street journalists during the entire period of field research. The entire local citizenry is invited to participate as well.
- Hyper-local: Locast Civic Media talks about your city, area, neighborhood, street. It proposes local narrations to complement global ones coming from official media.
- Participatory: citizens autonomously create reports, share and discuss them with the community, and re-define the information agenda.
- Flexible: Locast provides several options to participate in the community. Anyone with basic digital gear and an internet connection can find a way to make their voice heard.
- Space 2.0: Locast augments physical space with multiple layers of information that are democratically generated from the bottom-up by its users.
- Real-time and ubiquitous: citizen journalists using our mobile application are tightly connected to the rest of the community. When a cast is created, it becomes immediately available online for peer-review.
