Gamification of Citizen Sensing through Mobile Social Reporting

The explosion of user-generated content on the Social Web published from mobile devices has seen reporting applications grow in popularity from self-reporting style workout tracking applications like Fitocracy(1) to community reporting applications like FixMyStreet(2). In this paper, we introduce the concept of social mobile reporting where a community of people report on issues within their environment. We discuss annotating contextual metadata to reports, and the use of gamification to create an engaging user experience. We propose a design of the architecture of a social reporting framework including a description of the reports server that incorporates semantic data harvesting and provision. We outline a mobile application including game design elements of the mobile user experience, and a discussion of imaging technology to aid in processing of citizen reports and we provide some ideas for future work along with our conclusions.