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Course-‐work description Group Project (CSCW 2013 sem. 2) This document describes the course-‐work to be completed by the students who are taking the module on CSCW in the academic year 2013-‐2014.
Mark component: Group work = 50%1
The mark is divided in 3 deliverable D1-‐ group preparation (10%)
D2 – presentation (20%)
D3 – final report (70%)
Learning outcomes: the project is designed to give students first-‐hand experience of a community building project. The project is based on SmartCampus providing the students with the unique possibility to participate in a real-‐life action-‐research project.
The students will learn how to foster a community, how to understand user behaviour conducting interviews, analyzing and interpreting the data within the theoretical frameworks introduced in the course, write an evaluation report. Students will be exposed to typical group work dynamics, and will learn how to share information and co-‐ordinate tasks.
Deadline: May 27 presentation sessions – May 29 deliverable e-mailed to [email protected] Objectives The assignment consists of the design of a mobile social network for the smart campus project to increase students participation in the smartcampus project. The students will apply the theoretical framework introduced in the class to study adoption drivers and behavioural patterns within a student population. The major research questions addressed by the assignment are
a) What factors and functions do make mobile SNP’s attractive to students? b) What are mobile SNP’s used for, and how do they differ from more
traditional one? c) What strategies should the smartcampus project adopt in order to
increase its community base? 1 The project will include both individual and group activities. Students will hand-in evidence of their individual work (interview transcripts and data analysis), which will be marked for completeness and accuracy and influence the student’s mark in case of discrepancy with the group-work mark. Students will also be invited to evaluate each group member contribution, including their own. Evidence of exceptional performance or sub-average contribution will be taken into consideration in the final mark.

The project is composed of 3 phases:
Analysis of existing mobile social networks. The students have to analyse critically existing mobile social networks describing advantages and disadvantages related to them. Examples include but are not limited to Foursquare, Twitter etc.
Interviews. Each student will interview 3 students face to face. Participants should not be familiar with the smartcampus project. During the interviews the participants’ virtual spaces will be used as props. The main questions will focus around the student behaviour in on-‐line communities, their expectations, likes and dislikes. Particular attention should be devoted to mobile on-‐line social networks, to understand if the students know about them and how they differ from traditional internet based ones. Participants should be presented with the best examples found in the previous phase asking them to use it and comment on them. Finally, the interviewers should introduce the participants to the smart campus project asking them to comment on current possibilities for communication (forum, SNPs, myCV, event sharing in Vivi Trento).
Design of a mobile social network for smart campus. In this phase the students should write a plan for the creation and consolidation of a lively mobile social network within the smart campus apps. The community could be designed inside existing apps or as a stand alone app, taking into consideration anyway the smart campus eco-‐system.
Report writing. The group will produce a 20 pages (max) report of the evaluation. Report writing is both an individual and a group activity. All members are expected to contribute to it and the report will be marked as a group deliverable not as a collection of chapters authored by different people. The report will be composed of:
-‐ Executive summary (1 page stating the main findings and recommendation from your study)
-‐ Objectives (stating and justifying the objectives of the study)
-‐ Analysis of existing mobile social networks (description of current technological offers possibly supplemented by a literature review on evaluation studies)
-‐ Interviews (clear description of the evaluation procedures and results)
-‐ Design proposal (detailed report on mobile community proposals, taking into account issues of usability and sociability)
-‐ Conclusion (recommendations, suggestion for further research)

SmartCampus: An introduction
SmartCampus (www.smartcampuslab.it) was launched and funded by Trento RISE in 2012. Trento RISE is a core partner of the EIT-ICT Labs and a pole of international excellence in Trentino connecting the major regional actors in ICT research, education and innovation. The University of Trento and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler participate in the project both as providers of research results and innovative ICT solutions, and as institutions of the SmartCampus ecosystem. SmartCampus is a first step toward the vision of a smart city in Trentino. The campus, with its students, researchers, and institutions, is a scaled-down, but complete, model of a SmartCity. It provides a complex, yet controlled, ecosystem of citizens, operations, and businesses. Our long term goal is to realize a smart city living lab in Trentino, and SmartCampus will prepare a first core of citizens for seeding the vision and opening it to a wider population. The SmartCampus project is creating a mobile social network for students and staff. This network offers information about the university and the city, as well as various ways to create and share information. SmartCampus aims to a massive delivery of novel services to improve the quality of life of students, researchers, and all other citizens of a campus. These services are to support people not only in their work activities, but also in their practical and social life fostering their wellbeing as individuals and citizens. At the moment, there are six apps available, but new ones will be added later following a community based participatory design. The available apps are illustrated in Figure 1

Figure 1. The smart campus apps MyCVs lets students create an officially approved portfolio of their experiences at the university. LifeLog lets users create and record their experiences around the campus and the city and share these experiences with others. MyPeople lets people manage their friends list and their social networks, deciding what to share with who. Inbox is meant to help users manage messages from the other apps as well as external sources, such as the university. ViviTrento displays interesting places and activities within Trento. Users follow places, post and are notified about events. They can also share itinerary for pragmatic or hedonic purposes, such as the itinerary for collecting all documents to apply for a VISA, or to spend an enjoyable night out. ViaggiaTrento helps people plan trips within the city using public or private transportation. Users can comment on the trip, communicating delays and accidents, congestions, and organising outings with friends. The emphasis on mobility is a specific requirement of the campus in Trento, which despite being a pretty small city, hosts the scientific park on a hill, the rest of the University in the historical city centre, the students accommodations and most sport facilities in the outskirts. The ambitious goal of the project is to increase exponentially the number of services, exploiting the community creativity in all parts of the project. Thus, the technological backbone of SmartCampus is developing as an End-User Development platform (http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/EUD-Book-Intro.html) which offers an open environment where people and institutions collaborate in the identification, design, development, and delivery of services. This platform does not only offer flexible, dynamic, and personalized access to the services, through Web and mobile applications. It also aims to empower the community to create innovative services they want and like. In this vision, ICT solutions become invisible and pervasive, enabling the delivery of innovative services to support personal, social and cultural growth of the community members. Thus, SmartCampus promotes a central and

active role for the community. Members are users, designers and developers of the services they want and need. The project started on January 1st, 2012, and will last 36 months. The start-up phase, which covered the first 8 months, lead to the deployment of the ICT infrastructures, the design of the first services, and the establishment of a community of active users. In October 2012, we delivered a Samsung Galaxy S II Android smartphone and the first services to 100 Computer Science students enrolled in the course of HCI. This initiated one of the largest field-study in a real life context worldwide allowing evaluation and refinement of the services. The best ideas developed by these students are currently in development at the SmartCampusLab, where the students were offered internship and thesis possibilities. In February 2013, we distributed 25 devices to Sociology Students, and in March 2013 another 50 between Computer Science students enrolled in the course of HCI and researchers in the HCI team at the University of Trento. In return for the smartphone and a pre-paid SIM card, the students agree in participating to a large-scale user research. The objective of the project is to create a lively community of active users. The community was initially involved in the very early phase of the project to identify those services that are more valuable to them. Then, they were involved in the design and evaluation of these services, and more recently they have been involved in development. The ultimate goal of SmartCampus is a steady growth of the community who will appropriate the platform and services, thus ensuring sustainability after the end of the project.