An online tool to promote citizenship roles in urban community organizations

Abstract

A community does not only provide a circle where people make friends for life, it also promotes helping behaviors among members. Community members are capable and willing to contribute to community co-development because of the similar ideas and beliefs that they share. This paper introduces a community engagement tool which promote self-help activities in an organization by associating people who need help to responsible members who can offer support in an urban community setting. The online tool increases the degree of helping behavior by maximizing the effect coverage of potential contributors and using an automated online matching mechanism. The system eliminates perturbing community members who are not able to participate by using a targeted messaging method. In this paper, we will discuss how human factors are considered during the design and implementation process when building such an inclusive tool for a diverse population of users.