Community exchange: Social software to support group discussion

Aim of this project is to design a web application that supports a community in discussing a complex issue such as energy consumption and climate change. The main focus here is to design a platform that allows community members to communicate via a technology intervention that enhances social interactions in a normal community conversation context and to assist with making discussion more effective especially in creating and sharing content to support understanding. It provides the important benefit of community members receiving support and information from others, especially as it encourages and increases community engagement in the discussion to support their behaviour change. To bring about behaviour change in the community, the application help presented the ecological argument for reducing power consumption and to support sharing of experiences between community members. In response to our observations in the face-to-face discussion, we designed a sharing and communication application, Energymark social software (ESS), to improve a social group´s sharing of information, tips and experiences. ESS provides communication and social awareness tools, which enable users to build conversations in the context of shared content and browse their social networks. Final responses to ESS from a focus group and the deployment of the system to test users have been positive where results from open-ended questionnaire and focus group study, we found that usability of the implemented social software does related to the engagement of users and active participation of users in a long term does contribute to their behaviour change in reducing energy usage and climate change..