Midtown Buzz: Bridging the Gap Between Concepts and Impact in a Civic Computing Initiative.

Midtown Buzz is a partnership between Georgia Tech and Midtown Alliance (MA), focusing on engaging urban communities through mobile innovation. Since 2013, we have been collaborating with the Midtown Atlanta community with the goal of transforming the area into an innovation district. This approach provided us with an opportunity to utilize Midtown as a living laboratory for civic computing research. During the two years of this project we have engaged in a participatory design process with diverse stakeholders to explore the needs of people in the Midtown area, and develop new technologies and approaches to address the identified needs. In this paper we discuss the lessons learned regarding the challenges of bridging the gap between concepts and deployable systems that can create positive transformation in a community.