W. G. Griswold, P. Shanahan, S. W. Brown, and R. T. Boyer. Activecampus: Experiments in community-oriented ubiquitous computing. IEEE Computer, 37(10), 2003. [pdf]

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This paper presents the ActiveCampus projects, an experiment of community-oriented ubiquitous computing. Basically, the authors offered to the users an application fot PDAs that allowed them to exchange virtual graffiti over the campus map. The paper details the ecological approach used, the relevant facts which emerged during the trial and the results of the study.

They chose to create a viral community, because as they state, for the project sustainability they had to increase the application value, which increase with the number of users.

One of the most interesting findings is the analysis of the message sender and receiver locations. The analysis showed that for 473 out of 539 pairs the distance when messaging was less than the average distance. In short relative location as a context seems to matter in community-oriented computing.

Tags: collaboration tools, graffiti, location awareness, Location Based Services, tagging, ubiquitous computing