JoinUs: Management of Mobile Social Networks for Pervasive Collaboration

Billions of users carry mobile phones nowadays. However, few of them use the phones in more interesting ways than just phone call. In this work, we will present a system design and a proof-of-concept implementation that allows pervasive collaboration among cell phone users using a mobile social network. Our idea is to use new resources available at smart phones to exploit principles of spatial locality (geographical area), temporal locality (instant warning) and interest matching (personal interest on the subject) in order to engage a number of users to collaborate on mini-tasks, also called mini-campaigns that build up spontaneous ldquoflash mobs.