Leveraging Location Sharing to Increase Social Capital in Local Communities

Through my doctoral research, I aim to gain a deeper understanding of how LBPHDs, location-based, post-hoc data applications, can be used to build social capital in urban communities. From a case study of a dating app that utilizes shared location history, happn, we explored how LBPHD information has been used to build interpersonal relationships. Based on these findings, we designed MoveMeant, an application that extends LBPHD from interpersonal to community-level information sharing. Preliminary qualitative field results suggest the potential of MoveMeant to increase local community awareness through dissemination of local knowledge and discovery of third places. Future work in this area include a larger qualitative study and quantitative study of MoveMeant, and further understanding its application to other situations.