Public Opinion Channel: A Challenge for Interactive Community Broadcasting

A novel communication medium is described for sharing and exchanging information and opinions in a community, the "Public Opinion Channel (POC)." The POC collects information and opinions from members of a community and broadcasts them as edited stories. Rather than simply building a passive medium, we are developing an active medium that can provide a means for forming public opinion based on mutual understanding through the information circulation. The POC will enable community members to easily obtain information about the other members of the community and to learn how they can contribute to the community. People using POC will be able to easily get information about the community and thus join into it more smoothly. Building the POC is thus a worthwhile challenge in information and communication technology and it will contribute to the study of digital cities as a city community communication medium.