Creating City Community Consanguinity: Use of Public Opinion Channel in Digital Cities

People moving into cities have trouble acquiring informal information because it is not easy for them to join discussions of the people already living there. We therefore developed an automatic community broadcasting system helping city residents share informal information. This Public Opinion Channel (POC) collects opinions from city residents and broadcasts them continuously. Here we describe the conceptual framework of the POC, a prototype POC system, and the evaluation of that prototype system. The results from a social psychological experiment show that the prototype system helps newcomers express their opinions to a community easily.