Our Gratitude Tree website is launched

Gratitude Tree is a digital ‘forest of thanks’ that was developed to allow people to share their appreciation and positivity during, and following, the Covid-19 global pandemic.

A series of psychological studies have demonstrated the positive impact of gratitude on people’s wellbeing and
health.

People could add a tree or a leaf and share it via social media sites. People also could just explore the trees to enjoy the positive messages and stories:

https://gratitude-tree.org/

Building trust in digital policing

We report on a review of policing apps where we examined whether they sought to meet community needs and policing visions.  We systematically scoped 240 existing online citizen-police and relevant third-party communication apps and found that that 82% required registration or login details, 55% of those with a reporting mechanism allowed for anonymous reporting, and 10% provided an understandable privacy policy. Police apps were more likely to seek to reassure, safeguard and inform users, while third-party apps were more likely to seek to empower users. As poorly designed apps risk amplifying mistrust and undermining policing efforts, we suggest 12 design considerations to help ensure the development of high quality/fit for purpose Police/Citizen apps.

Our findings are reported in: Elphick, Camilla; et al. (2021). Building trust in digital policing: a scoping review of community policing apps. Police Practice and Research (Early Access). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15614263.2020.1861449

CITIZEN FORENSICS RESEARCH APPEARING AT CHI 2020

This year’s ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems includes three publications resulting from our early work on the Citizen Forensics project. These are a Late Breaking Work paper reporting some preliminary findings on designing technologies for community policing; a review of community policing apps developed for use in Asian countries (Asian CHI Symposium); and a paper on our conceptual framework for citizen forensics in the Workshop on Crime, Punishment and HCI. For more details, including pre-print copies of these papers, please see our publications page

SPECIAL MEETING

Arosha Bandara has been invited to a round table discussion on “Privacy Metrics” by the Technology Advisory Panel (TAP) of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner (IPCO). The meeting will take place at St. John’s College, Cambridge and will focus on “…the availability and development of techniques to use investigatory powers while minimising interference with privacy.”

JOB VACANCIES

The advertisement period for the different research vacancies associated with this project have now closed.