EnvAware: Social Network for community environmental awareness

Social Networks offer a context for people to meet, communicate and collaborate. Tools to support communities usually provide a communication medium and functionalities to find communication partners. This paper describes our mobile framework EnvAware which engages the public in location sensitive experiences and in municipal monitoring of their environment, available both on users' mobile phones, and online. This is centered on the use of smart phones as sources and sinks of information. It involves coordination among multiple phones as well as sensors deployed in the environment. This mobile forum is based on Cell-ID positioning and GPRS communications. It stores and receives information from a remote server which analyses and processes the scientific data received from a scalable mobile sensing framework called mFeel. The processed data and exchanged information are made available to local communities through EnvAware.