  This paper explores a design study of a smartphone enabled meet-up app meant
to inspire engagement in community innovation. Community hubs such as
co-working spaces, incubators, and maker spaces attract community members with
diverse interests. This paper presents these spaces as a design opportunity for
an application that helps host community-centered meet-ups in smart and
connected communities. Our design study explores three scenarios of use,
inspired by previous literature, for organizing meet-ups and compares them by
surveying potential users. Based on the results of our survey, we propose
several design implications and implement them in the Community Animator
geosocial networking application, which identifies nearby individuals that are
willing to chat or perform community-centered activities. We present the
results of both our survey and our prototype, discuss our design goals, and
provide design implications for civic-minded, geosocial networking
applications. Our contribution in this work is the development process,
proposed design of a mobile application to support community-centered meet-ups,
and insights for future work.
