Measuring the Impact of Third Place Attachment on the Adoption of a Place-based Community Technology

Shelly D. Farnham, Joseph F. McCarthy, Yagnesh Patel, Sameer Ahuja, Daniel Norman, William R. Hazlewood and Josh Lind
27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009), 4-9 April 2009, Boston, MA
[Paper (PDF)] [Slides (@SlideShare)]

Abstract:

CoCollage is a placed-based community technology that leverages the power of online social networking to facilitate awareness and face-to-face interactions in a third place. We adapted standardized measures of place attachment, social networks and psychological sense of community to provide a framework grounded in the social science literature for studying real world adoption of place-based community technologies. We found the standardized measures of place attachment and psychological sense of community meaningfully predicted likelihood of technology adoption and usage in a café. We discuss some lessons learned from our initial deployment of CoCollage in a real-world setting to support a nascent place-based community.