MoveMeant: Anonymously Building Community Through Shared Location Histories.

Awareness of and connections to a local community are important for building social capital, sharing resources, and providing physical support, but have been elusive to create in dense urban environments. We describe the design and implementation of MoveMeant, a system aimed to increase local community awareness through shared location traces. MoveMeant securely uses anonymized location data generated automatically by mobile devices to display aggregate, community-level location data. We report findings from interviews with residents in the Bronx, New York City who participated in a deployment of MoveMeant over a 6-week period. Our findings show that people use the anonymous information to make judgments about the people and places in their community, while opting to reveal their identity for third places where there is an opportunity to connect socially.