News/Research

City Sandbox Goes Live

06 Jul, 2011

City Sandbox Goes Live

A collaboration of art, engineering, and social sciences at the University of California, citysandbox.com, is live! This new website helps residents ask questions about specific places in their neighborhoods and aims to be a tool for individuals to make their city a better place. Question/Respond/Participate. Neighbors can discuss their concerns with other neighbors, identify priorities, form collective opinions, and take action towards common goals. They can find out who else is interested in their questions and how a group can address them. Through a system of voting and discussion, all community members can weigh in, make their voices heard, and build their reputations as active citizens.

Citysandbox.com is currently open to the public for beta testing and feedback. It is a project of the Social App Lab at CITRIS. The Lab is founded and directed by Professors James Holston (Anthropology) and Greg Niemeyer (Art Practice and New Media Studies) and focuses on the potential of cell phones and other locative media to harness the participatory energies of game-play to address social issues.

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