Case study

Community Circles — mobile & gamified e-participation platform

Location-based mobile game that turns citizens into active participants in urban governance through geo-referenced contributions with expanding impact areas.

Published TagsMobile app · Research · Civic tech
Community Circles — location-based e-participation mobile app, portfolio thumbnail

Insight

Smartphone applications for citizen engagement in urban governance tend to reduce participation to one-way issue reporting — "report a pothole" patterns that don't create lasting involvement. Community Circles was designed to address that limitation.

Idea

Community Circles is a location-based mobile game that encourages citizens to create geo-referenced contributions — ideas, issues, opinions, polls — each with an impact area that expands as other citizens engage. Adjacent impact areas can merge into bigger communities of discussion. Contributions have a lifespan, extendable through engagement — the goal is to cultivate active communities around a place and a topic, not just collect isolated reports.

Community Circles map screen — geo-referenced contributions displayed as coloured impact areas layered over a city map
Map overview of contributions and impact areas
Contribution overview screen — tapping on an impact area opens a detail view showing the contribution's summary and activity
Contribution overview after tapping on a contribution
Contribution detail with discussion area — the full contribution, reactions, and threaded discussion feed
Contribution details with discussion area
Player profile screen — rank, contribution count, impact metrics, and engagement score for an individual participant
Player's profile with rank and important metrics

Implementation

The platform combines a hybrid mobile client with a backend service. The client runs on iOS and Android via the Ionic framework. The backend is built on Django with PostGIS for spatial queries, delivered to the client through a REST API.

Impact

The concept was evaluated through a live game trial with real users around a municipal district in Vienna. A work-in-progress poster was presented at CHI'14 in Toronto within the interdisciplinary b-Part research programme, which explored new forms of civic engagement in the smart-city context.