Waze, the social navigator

Waze is a 100% free turn-by-turn GPS navigation application that provides real-time traffic updates, plus all kinds of cool social and geo-gaming elements that actually make commuting fun. Wazers can actively update one another on traffic, police traps, construction, speedcams and more – and because it’s user-generated, the more people who use it, the better (and more addicting) it gets!

Just drive! when million of users drive using waze they’re simply creating and updating maps, with realtime data as traffic, police etc etc. Using Waze is also a game experience: you earn points (to get more ability as user) unlocking bonus on the map, simply driving to a specific spot. Waze is a project of Ehud Shabtai, a software engineer with a degree in Philosophy and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, is completely free, is user generated…what is its business model?  The navigable data market is a huge market and their current business model involves selling our data set (maps, traffic, etc.) to relevant third parties while keeping the service free for individual users.

Published on October 9, 2011 23:24.
Filed under: matteo moretti, participation, social web, technology

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The Project: Process and Outcomes

Children Village is a project of the NGO AMREF in the slums of Nairobi for the rehabilitation, resocialization and reintegration of street kids. Apart from practical help kids are empowered to articulate their points of view by participating in creative activity, above all in so-called participatory video projects. This gives not only the capability to co-create videos about stories that matter to them, but also to develop as individuals and as a community.

The quality and the potential of this kind of social work have to be communicated to raise awareness, to get supporters and donation. Furthermore the creative work of the street kid has the potential to change the stereotype of the “poor African victims”. Therefor it should obtain more visibility.

As designers we want to help to reach these goals in two ways: first we render messages concise and attractive, and second we design a web platform, which uses the mechanisms of the so-called social web, so that the Children Village becomes visible also outside its own web site and its messages spread in viral ways. This platform is designed in a way that it can be implemented as a system, which can be updates easily by the social workers themselves.

results of the working groups:

Badstreet (André Rebelo, Maria Grilo, Yael Fierro)

Dragoretti (Anna Leoni, Mayu Knipper, Marco Ciceri)

Meureka (?, ?)

Share (Karim Hamily, Nicola Santarossa, Robert Simic)

Ubuntu (Eva Kaufmann, Simone Gebsattel, Gernot Rella)

Ushiriki (Raffaella De Rossi, Luca Mariotti)

zzzzoom (Afra Hackl, Francisca Ramalho, Pedro Colaco, Raphael Volkmer)

Published on January 10, 2012 12:38.
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