Community engagement efforts increasingly look to harness mobile devices and mobile applications to access, inform, and empower the public. However the mobile market is evolving at a fast pace, which complicates our understanding of what works best.
"The more you read about the blending of planning and technology, the more you start to hear a lot of the same words: digital citizens, civic engagement, government 2.0, hacktivists, and so on," writes Lucas Lindsey. "For the most part this is because we’re all reading the same blogs and following the same few trail-blazing companies."
But mobile technology is rapidly changing how we connect to, and interact with, the Internet. "[W]hen it comes to tech-based community engagement efforts mobile matters, more and more everyday," notes Lindsey.
"Given this rapid change, urban planners must focus less on the present state of things—because in the tech world mastering the present alone means you’re already behind. We must develop a framework for considering community needs that do not change within the context of technology that rapidly does."
Lindsey proposes such a framework to guide the next generation of mobile engagement technologies.
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