Withshare: A Mobile Application to Support Community Coproduction Activities

Coproductions are reciprocal activities that all parties are actively engaged in and create synergies that cannot be produced by one party alone. Coproduction activities are important for community building, as the social interactions among community members create social values such as new social ties, trust and reciprocal recognition. Mobile technologies bring new opportunity for coproductions by supporting small-scale reciprocal activities that are location and time sensitive. In this article, the authors introduce and study WithShare, a smartphone application that helps people to organize such coproduction activities. A 3-week user study with 38 young adults in a local community of college students shows WithShare facilitates the coordination of opportunistic and lightweight reciprocal activities in their daily life. The results highlight potentials of coproduction activities in strengthening existing social ties, and establishing new weak ties in the local community. The findings suggest important design implications for mobile technologies to support coproduction activities.