Constructing Collaborative Online Communities for Visualizing Spimes

The digital age has brought about new platforms for collaboration which have provided interesting and effective ways of enabling people to engage in a wide variety of socially-driven activities. One only needs to observe the many free/libre open source software projects on the web, where millions of connected individuals actively participate in the development and deployment of a wide range of software applications and tools. For many of us, there is a great appeal to this ideology, one comprising of a more transparent and open culture of collaboration. Such activities encourage freedom and shared learning which could be considered essential to human growth and innovation. In this paper we describe research with such goals. Specific to our research includes the development of online and mobile user interfaces for the visualization of food ``spimes'' (informationally-rich food-based data), seeking to understand how best to enable and encourage people to share information/knowledge, visualize/compare choices, and understand different aspects of food quality. By democratizing food knowledge in such respects, it is the goal that we develop a more satisfying food culture, enabling people to collectively realize more healthy, socially acceptable, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective food choices.