Technique for evaluating photo sharing interfaces with the early prototypes - group simulation

User evaluations using paper prototypes commonly lack social context. The Group simulation technique described in this paper offers a solution to this problem. The study introduces an early-phase participatory design technique targeted for small groups. The proposed technique is used for evaluating an interface, which enables group work in photo collection creation. Three groups of four users, 12 in total, took part in a simulation session where they tested a low-fidelity design concept that included their own personal photo content from an event that their group attended together. The users’ own content was used to evoke natural experiences. Our results indicate that the technique helped users to naturally engage with the prototype in the session. The technique is suggested to be suitable for evaluating other early-phase concepts and to guide design solutions, especially with the concepts that include users’ personal content and enable content sharing.

Geo-locked photo sharing on mobile devices

We introduce the idea of geo-locking through a mobile phone based photo sharing application called Picalilly (figure 1). Using its geo-locking feature, Picalilly allows its users to manually define geographical boundaries for sharing photos -- limiting sharing within user-defined boundaries as well as facilitating open sharing between strangers within such boundaries. To explore the potential of geo-locking, we carried out a small scale field trial of Picalilly involving two groups of students, who were part of a two-week long introduction program at a university. Our preliminary results show that Picalilly facilitated 1) sharing of 'places' and 2) localized explorations.

Designing for engagement towards healthier lifestyles through food image sharing : the case of I8DAT

This paper introduces the underlying design concepts of I8DAT, a food image sharing application that has been developed as part of a three-year research project – Eat, Cook, Grow: Ubiquitous Technology for Sustainable Food Culture in the City (http://www.urbaninformatics .net/projects/food) – exploring urban food practices to engage people in healthier, more environmentally and socially sustainable eating, cooking, and growing food in their everyday lives. The key aim of the project is to produce actionable knowledge, which is then applied to create and test several accessible, user-centred interactive design solutions that motivate user-engagement through playful and social means rather than authoritative information distribution. Through the design and implementation processes we envisage to integrate these design interventions to create a sustainable food network that is both technical and socio-cultural in nature (technosocial). Our primary research locale is Brisbane, Australia, with additional work carried out in three reference cities with divergent geographic, socio-cultural, and technological backgrounds: Seoul, South Korea, for its global leadership in ubiquitous technology, broadband access, and high population density; Lincoln, UK, for the regional and peri-urban dimension it provides, and Portland, Oregon, US, for its international standing as a hub of the sustainable food movement.

Searching the self in Seoul : trans-youth and urban social networking in Korea

This paper presents a brief analysis of Seoul trans-youth’s search for identity through urban social networking, arguing that technological, socio-cultural and environmental (urban) contexts frame how mobility and ubiquity are (re)created in Seoul. The paper is empirically based on fieldwork conducted in Seoul, South Korea, from 2007 to 2008 as part of a research project on the mobile play culture of Seoul trans-youth(a term that will be explained in detail in the following section). Shared Visual Ethnography (SVE) was used as the research method which involved sharing of visual ethnographic data that were created by the participants. More specifically, the participants were asked to take photos, which were then shared and discussed with other participants and the researcher on the photo-sharing service Flickr. The research also involved a questionnaire and daily activity diaries, as well as interviews. A total of 44 Korean transyouths – including 23 females and 21 males – participated in interviews and photo-sharing. The paper draws specifically on the qualitative data from individual and/or group interviews, the total duration of which was 2–2.5 hours for each participant.

From social butterfly to urban citizen workshop

Web applications such as blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing sites, and social networking systems have been termed ‘Web 2.0’ to highlight an arguably more open, collaborative, personalisable, and therefore more participatory internet experience than what had previously been possible. Giving rise to a culture of participation, an increasing number of these social applications are now available on mobile phones where they take advantage of device-specific features such as sensors, location and context awareness. This workshop made a contribution towards exploring and better understanding the opportunities and challenges provided by tools, interfaces, methods and practices of social and mobile technology that enable participation and engagement. It brought together a group of academics and practitioners from a diverse range of disciplines such as computing and engineering, social sciences, digital media and human-computer interaction to critically examine a range of applications of social and mobile technology, such as social networking, mobile interaction, wikis (eg., futuremelbourne.com.au), twitter, blogging, virtual worlds (eg, hub2.org), and their impact to foster community activism, civic engagement and cultural citizenship.

From social butterfly to engaged citizen: Urban informatics, social media, ubiquitous computing, and mobile technology to support citizen engagement

Web applications such as blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing sites, and social networking systems have been termed ‘Web 2.0’ to highlight an arguably more open, collaborative, personalisable, and therefore more participatory internet experience than what had previously been possible. Giving rise to a culture of participation, an increasing number of these social applications are now available on mobile phones where they take advantage of device-specific features such as sensors, location and context awareness. This international volume of book chapters will make a contribution towards exploring and better understanding the opportunities and challenges provided by tools, interfaces, methods and practices of social and mobile technology that enable participation and engagement. It brings together an international group of academics and practitioners from a diverse range of disciplines such as computing and engineering, social sciences, digital media and human-computer interaction to critically examine a range of applications of social and mobile technology, such as social networking, mobile interaction, wikis, twitter, blogging, virtual worlds, shared displays and urban sceens, and their impact to foster community activism, civic engagement and cultural citizenship.

Eat Cook Grow : Mixing Human-Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions

Food has been a major agenda in political, socio-cultural, and environmental domains throughout history. The significance of food has been particularly highlighted in recent years with the growing public awareness of the unfolding impacts of climate change, challenging our understanding, practice, and expectations of our relationship with food. Parallel to this development has been the rise of web applications such as blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing sites, and social networking systems that are arguably more open, collaborative, and personalisable. These so-called ‘Web 2.0’ technologies have contributed to a more participatory Internet experience than what had previously been possible. An increasing number of these social applications are now available on mobile technologies where they take advantage of device-specific features such as sensors, location and context awareness, further expanding potential for the culture of participation and creativity. This international volume assembles a diverse collection of book chapters that contribute towards exploring and better understanding the opportunities and challenges provided by tools, interfaces, methods, and practices of social and mobile technology to enable engagement with people and creativity in the domain of food in contemporary society. It brings together an international group of academics and practitioners from a diverse range of disciplines such as computing and engineering, social sciences, digital media and human-computer interaction to critically examine a range of applications of social and mobile technology, such as social networking, mobile interaction, wikis, twitter, blogging, mapping, shared displays and urban screens, and their impact to foster a better understanding and practice of environmentally, socio-culturally, economically, and health-wise sustainable food culture.

Crisis Communication in Natural Disasters : The Queensland Floods and Christchurch Earthquakes

Over the past decade, social media have gone through a process of legitimation and official adoption, and they are now becoming embedded as part of the official communications apparatus of many commercial and public-sector organisations— in turn, providing platforms like Twitter with their own sources of legitimacy. Arguably, the demonstrated utility of social media platforms and tools in times of crisis—from civil unrest and violent crime through to natural disasters like bushfires, earthquakes, and floods—has been a crucial driver of this newfound legitimacy. In the mid-2000s, user-created content and ‘Web 2.0’ platforms were known to play a role in crisis communication; back then, the involvement of extra-institutional actors in providing and sharing information around such events involved distributed, ad hoc, or niche platforms (like Flickr), and was more likely to be framed as ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘crowdsourcing’ (see, for example, Liu, Palen, Sutton, Hughes, & Vieweg, 2008, on the then-emerging role of photo-sharing in disasters). Since then, the dramatically increased take-up of mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter means that the pool of potential participants in online crisis communication has broadened to include a much larger proportion of the general population, as well as traditional media and official emergency response organisations.

Practices surrounding event photos

Sharing photos through mobile devices has a great potential for creating shared experiences of social events between co-located as well as remote participants. In order to design novel event sharing tools, we need to develop in-depth understanding of current practices surrounding these so called ‘event photos’- photos about and taken during different social events such as weddings picnics, and music concert visits among others. We studied people’s practices related to event photos through in-depth interviews, guided home visits and naturalistic observations. Our results show four major themes describing practices surrounding event photos: 1) representing events, 2) significant moments, 3) situated activities through photos, and 4) collectivism and roles of participants.

Producing while consuming: Social interaction around photos shared within private group

User-generated content plays a pivotal role in the current social media. The main focus, however, has been on the explicitly generated user content such as photos, videos and status updates on different social networking sites. In this paper, we explore the potential of implicitly generated user content, based on users’ online consumption behaviors. It is technically feasible to record users’ consumption behaviors on mobile devices and share that with relevant people. Mobile devices with such capabilities could enrich social interactions around the consumed content, but it may also threaten users’ privacy. To understand the potentials of this design direction we created and evaluated a low-fidelity prototype intended for photo sharing within private groups. Our prototype incorporates two design concepts, namely, FingerPrint and MoodPhotos that leverage users’ consumption history and emotional responses. In this paper, we report user values and user acceptance of this prototype from three participatory design workshops.

Dual compressible hybrid quantum secret sharing schemes based on extended unitary operations

A crucial issue with hybrid quantum secret sharing schemes is the amount of data that is allocated to the participants. The smaller the amount of allocated data, the better the performance of a scheme. Moreover, quantum data is very hard and expensive to deal with, therefore, it is desirable to use as little quantum data as possible. To achieve this goal, we first construct extended unitary operations by the tensor product of n, n ≥ 2, basic unitary operations, and then by using those extended operations, we design two quantum secret sharing schemes. The resulting dual compressible hybrid quantum secret sharing schemes, in which classical data play a complementary role to quantum data, range from threshold to access structure. Compared with the existing hybrid quantum secret sharing schemes, our proposed schemes not only reduce the number of quantum participants, but also the number of particles and the size of classical shares. To be exact, the number of particles that are used to carry quantum data is reduced to 1 while the size of classical secret shares also is also reduced to l−2 m−1 based on ((m+1, n′)) threshold and to l−2 r2 (where r2 is the number of maximal unqualified sets) based on adversary structure. Consequently, our proposed schemes can greatly reduce the cost and difficulty of generating and storing EPR pairs and lower the risk of transmitting encoded particles.

Knowledge Sharing within IT Projects

Even though today’s corporations recognize that they need to understand modern project management techniques (Schwalbe, 2002, p2), many researchers continue to provide evidence of poor IT project success. With Kotnour, (2000) finding that project performance is positively associated with project knowledge, a better understanding of how to effectively manage knowledge in IT projects should have considerable practical significance for increasing the chances of project success. Using a combined qualitative/quantitative method of data collection in multiple case studies spanning four continents, and comprising a variety of organizational types, the focus of this current research centered on the question of why individuals working within IT project teams might be motivated towards, or inhibited from, sharing their knowledge and experience in their activities, procedures, and processes. The research concluded with the development of a new theoretical model of knowledge sharing behavior, ‘The Alignment Model of Motivational Focus’. This model suggests that an individual’s propensity to share knowledge and experience is a function of perceived personal benefits and costs associated with the activity, balanced against the individual’s alignment to a group of ‘institutional’ factors. These factors are identified as alignments to the project team, to the organization, and dependent on the circumstances, to either the professional discipline or community of practice, to which the individual belongs.