iGraffiti: mobile Public Debate in the Urban Space

Context :

At last year’s workshop “iDemocracy! Do you? Open Voting and Tribe oriented Public Debate”, we proposed the idea of a “Political Wall”. The basic motivation was to explore open voting, public debate and democracy in social network times. The basic assumption being that social networks and tribe centered interactions could transform Public Debate in a way never imagined before and draw more participation and interest from citizens. Therefore, facilitating and enabling a Social Network based Public Debate where people can express and share their opinions, react, post, protest, argue, etc. through each others’ Political Wall appeared as a promising idea.

Expanding on this idea, this year’s workshop will investigate how mobility and particularly urban mobility can be introduced into Public Debate. The idea is that Public Debate should be brought back into the streets, where the citizens live: in the city and the urban space (by analogy to the Roman Forum). This is exactly where iGraffiti stands: the political graffiti is a very ancient kind of expression that citizens can use when they are in the street. We propose to use mobile technologies to assist citizens to virtually place graffitis (tags) in the urban space with opinions, ideas and comments, to share and discuss. The debate starts in the street and is further spread and developed over social networks.

Master level students in Information Systems and Public Administration are working on this idea. We will illustrate the workshop with their findings and results around the design of a service that exploits political posters in the street as the seed to initiate Public Debate.