FirstLife: Combining Social Networking and VGI to Create an Urban Coordination and Collaboration Platform

Designing an urban platform intended to be a shared virtual space for coordination, cooperation, and collaboration among public administrations, local institutions, civic organizations, businesses, and citizens is an open challenge. This paper presents the current framework and applications of the civic social network FirstLife, developed following a participatory design approach and an agile methodology. The platform combines volunteered geographic information (VGI) with social networking functionalities. The results of a progressive validation with perspective end-users are explained in terms of the resulting features integrated during the evolution of the platform. Finally, the experimentation of FirstLife in several projects is described.