Shintaro Azechi

Public opinion channel for communities in the information age

In this paper, we propose as a new challenge a public opinion channel which can provide a novel communication medium for sharing and exchanging opinions in a community. Rather than simply developing a means of investigating public opinion, we aim at an active medium that can facilitate mutual understanding, discussion, and public opinion formation. First, we elaborate the idea of public opinion channels and identify key issues. Second, we describe our first step towards the goal using the talking virtualized egos metaphor. Finally, we discuss a research agenda towards the goal.

Psychological effects of participations on the networked community

In this paper, we report the experiment to evaluate Public Opinion Channel (POC) by standardized scales for measuring humans needs (or intentions) of information-behavior. The results showed that members of POC community are satisfied with the need to acquire information, and POC is superior to BBS on this point. In the future, we need to construct standardized scales for measuring trait-needs and state-needs.

Creating City Community Consanguinity: Use of Public Opinion Channel in Digital Cities

People moving into cities have trouble acquiring informal information because it is not easy for them to join discussions of the people already living there. We therefore developed an automatic community broadcasting system helping city residents share informal information. This Public Opinion Channel (POC) collects opinions from city residents and broadcasts them continuously. Here we describe the conceptual framework of the POC, a prototype POC system, and the evaluation of that prototype system. The results from a social psychological experiment show that the prototype system helps newcomers express their opinions to a community easily.