Facilitating Citizen Engagement in Situ: Assessing the Impact of Pro-Active Geofenced Notifications

A key problem in the area of citizen engagement is to make people aware of opportunities to participate and to motivate them to take action. We propose an approach that uses geofences and proactive notifications on mobile devices to raise citizen awareness of engagement opportunities in situ and to trigger the exploration of these opportunities. Notifications are automatically triggered in the near vicinity of engagement opportunities based on space, time, and user preferences. We conducted two user studies to investigate our approach. A field-based study revealed specific usage patterns and motivational aspects of the situated discovery of engagement opportunities. A lab-based comparison study investigated the pragmatic and hedonistic qualities of our application. Results indicate that users prefer to be informed in situ even when they do not necessarily interact with notifications straight away.