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Tourism is an important economic activity, and a significant contributor to employment, growth and sustainable development for most of the predominantly small island developing states of the Caribbean. Community-based tourism, given its intuitively natural alignment with the interests and greater inclusiveness of local actors and communities, is considered to be an important contributor to sustainable tourism. This study aims to evaluate the potential for digital technologies to amplify the distinctiveness, enhance service delivery and ultimately contribute to the sustainability of community tourism contexts.

The research uses a form of participatory action research that involves active collaboration between researchers and practitioners. The authors propose a framework approach for implementing smart community initiatives within a community tourism context.

The human-centered, participatory framework approach described in this research can help to empower community tourism by providing increased visibility and enhanced service delivery for small operators. These outcomes can become important contributions to enhancing inclusive and sustainable development and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable local communities – a key outcome for sustainable development goal 11 – sustainable cities and communities.

The research is ongoing with the value outcomes still emerging. The empirical domain is confined to a single geographical context, so the findings and insights may not be generalizable.

Beyond the emerging research insights, the project produced specific digital artifacts such as geospatial data and technology platforms; and process outcomes such as training, capacity-building and empowerment of community members. In particular, youth trained to create and maintain the digital infrastructure (community mapping) provide an important local capability that can be re-purposed for other types of field-based data collection activities, thus providing alternative economic opportunities.

The map-based information and digital content are localized to a specific geographical context, using data mapped by local actors, who possess the best local knowledge about what the community has to offer. The approach and supporting technologies can be readily replicated into other communities.

This study aims to explore how health informatics can underpin the successful delivery of recovery-orientated healthcare, in rural and remote regions, to achieve better mental health outcomes. Recovery is an extremely social process that involves being with others and reconnecting with the world.

An interpretivist study involving 27 clinicians and 13 clients sought to determine how future expenditure on ehealth could improve mental health treatment and service provision in the western Murray Darling Basin of New South Wales, Australia.

Through the use of targeted ehealth strategies, it is possible to increase both the accessibility of information and the quality of service provision. In small communities, the challenges of distance, access to healthcare and the ease of isolating oneself are best overcome through a combination of technology and communal social responsibility. Technology supplements but cannot completely replace face-to-face interaction in the mental health recovery process.

The recovery model provides a conceptual framework for health informatics in rural and remote regions that is socially responsible. Service providers can affect better recovery for clients through infrastructure that enables timely and responsive remote access whilst driving between appointments. This could include interactive referral services, telehealth access to specialist clinicians, GPS for locating clients in remote areas and mobile coverage for counselling sessions in “real time”. Thus, the technology not only provides better connections but also adds to the responsiveness (and success) of any treatment available.

The Child Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) is a UNICEF-led collective impact intervention aimed at promoting children’s rights at the city and community levels. The CFCI operationalizes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) for local governments through a framework for action aimed at realizing the rights of young people under 18 years of age: (1) to be valued, respected and treated fairly; (2) to be heard; (3) to access social services; (4) to be safe; and (5) to participate in family, life, play and leisure. This chapter provides an historical analysis of the CFCI globally and in the United States, and how this intervention draws upon and advances sociological research on young people’s meaningful participation. We present three case studies to analyze young people’s participation in CFCIs and the lessons learned from Houston, Texas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and San Francisco, California.

Geotechnologies have a long tradition in several areas of society and research. The recent development of the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies opened several doors to the contribution of tourism. Emergent technologies contributions to tourism and planning such as web mapping, augmented reality (AR), crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are relatively recent, and there is a lack of research around their potential for Creative Tourism enhancement. For example, combining web mapping with AR or storytelling can be an excellent contribution to operators, planners and tourists. For research purposes, new opportunities are open, particularly by integrating community-shared data. It is well known for the popularity of social networks, the exponential growth of photo sharing, but few studies have been implemented to understand their contribution to research. This chapter focuses on emerging geotechnologies concerning cultural mapping, Creative Tourism and sustainability. Since it is a new growing niche, more research is needed to develop and understand the potential of new approaches. Besides traditional techniques such as quantitative (e.g. surveys) and qualitative ones (e.g. interviews, focus groups and world café), it revises the role of geotechnologies on Creative Tourism development and growing activities. Results from case studies from Europe are analysed.

Advances in geospatial technology, web map interfaces, and other Web 2.0 tools provide new opportunities for educators to engage students in critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaborative skills. Although little attention has been given to learning from maps in higher education, knowledge of space is critical to attitudes and decision making as global citizens. Additionally, the ability to easily create multimedia maps offers new educational affordances for students at a distance and has the potential to link geographic and cultural understanding within the context of a variety of disciplines. We discuss the development of a mapping and blogging interactive learning environment, MapBlog, as a visual platform for representing information spatially. In this chapter, the MapBlog will be discussed as an interactive learning environment and as a visual platform for representing information spatially. We present and discuss four MapBlog categories: external content, student-created content, static content, and thematic.

Community involvement is a common strategy to negotiate changes to the built environment. Traditional community involvement approaches are increasingly augmented through playful elements or through the use of technology. The purpose of this paper is to present a case study of a community involvement approach aimed at expanding participants’ ability to contribute to the issue. Through the design of bespoke interactive approaches to asking questions and receiving responses, the InstaBooth shifts the involvement process toward an open discussion between community members.

The InstaBooth methodology established in this paper is based on the use of a physical interactive installation for situated community involvement and place-making, the InstaBooth. This methodology embeds design thinking and collaborative approaches to move the focus of the engagement from data gathering to data sharing and content co-creation.

In 2015, the authors worked with the local community of Pomona, Queensland, Australia, to inform the new masterplan for the town center by using the InstaBooth as a community involvement methodology. Examining the case of Pomona reveals how the InstaBooth approach allows participants to join a discussion about their own environment in a playful and unstructured way. This is achieved through the application of design thinking across three key phases of the community engagement; 1) planning the engagement strategy, 2) implementation of the strategy and deployment and 3) data co-analysis.

The InstaBooth is an interactive methodology which has allowed citizens to engage in the discussion about the future development of their town strengthening their sense of place and sense of community. The significance of this paper is applicable to others interested in community involvement and place-making, as it presents a novel methodology that combines different methods for different contexts while embedding co-creation in its approach.

This paper seeks to discuss the outcomes of a road‐mapping research on social media project completed at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Social media refer to a combination of three elements: content, user communities, and Web 2.0 technologies.

The paper utilizes socio‐technical road‐mapping to study the potential transformations of social media in the virtual and physical spheres.

Road‐maps were constructed in three thematic areas: society, companies, and local environment. The results were crystallized into five development lines. The first development line is transparency and its increasing role in society. The second development line is the rise of a ubiquitous participatory communication model. The third development is reflexive empowerment citizens. The fourth development line is the duality of personalization/fragmentation vs mass effects/integration. The fifth development line is the new relations of physical and virtual worlds.

The study of social media has been focusing mainly on its technological aspects from the current perspective. This paper forms a future‐oriented perspective to social media in a wider societal context.