The 2nd When the City Meets the Citizen Workshop (WCMCW) 2013     

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The 2nd When the City Meets the Citizen Workshop (WCMCW) 2013 - overview

Guest Speakers Announced click here to read more

Background and Motivation

Social media analysis can play a key role in providing insights into people's activities, opinions and day-to-day lives. When they are geolocated, these user-generated information streams become a unique opportunity to understand the rhythms and tenors of a city and its citizens. By applying computational, social science, and humanities methods to social media data such as photos, tweets and check-ins, researchers are now beginning to conceive of new methodological and theoretical frameworks not only to extract local insights but, more importantly, to better understand cities and their residents.

Following the success of last years first WCMCW held in Dublin 2012 this workshop aims to understand the various ways in which social media data can be used to produce knowledge about cities that supports citizen engagement.

The WCMC workshop will involve discussions on topics such as (but not limited to):

• Improving understandings of the city through mining social media
• Use of social media to engage citizens (for example, through game mechanics)
• Visualizations and interfaces to enable exploration of city data
• Mobilizing communities through social media
• Pervasive applications for user interaction and data collection
• Disaster recovery and coordination using social media
• Enabling citizen and NGO initiatives through social media
• Methodology for quality evaluation and validation of user generated content
• Privacy and ethical concerns in citizen engagement

Objectives

Our aim is to facilitate a session that encourages computer scientists, industry professionals, academic researchers, architects, urban planners, government officials, hackers, artists, and other interested participants to work together to explore timely questions relating to social media, big data, citizen engagement and the creation of smarter cities. We will encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and attempt to foster a space in which participants can work together to create a common understanding of how social media data might address contemporary urban issues.

Participants will have the opportunity to showcase projects; discuss theoretical, methodological, ethical, and political questions in regard to the study of urban life through the prism of social media data; and participate in a brainstorming “data hacking” session where participants will collaboratively tackle a specific social media dataset.