Web-based community information sharing system :

Abstract

This study was set to explore the different ways in which the residents of Kazinga Village, Bweyogerere Township disseminate information among themselves. The main Objective of the study was to develop a Web-Based Community Information Sharing System. The researcher used across sectional survey design to carry out the research. The respondents for this study were; 2 Political leaders, 1 Police Officer, 1 Director of a secondary School, 3 Teachers, 2 Health workers, 2 Religious leaders and 7 Business proprietors making a total of 18 respondents. Questionnaire and interview techniques were employed to collect data which was analysed using the Microsoft Excel Package. The study revealed that the residents of Kazinga faced a number of challenges in the bid to communicate with one another including; infidelity, lack of clear guidelines that govern these platforms, poor administration of these platforms, lack of well stipulated fundraising channels, sectarianism and an inefficient notification criterion which only favors those members who are online at the time when something is posted on the platform. The findings prompted the researcher to develop a Web-Based Community Information Sharing System that notifies the residents by an ordinary SMS (Short Message Service) whenever something has been posted even before they get online, supports online community learning, consumer-vendor interactions, enables members to make financial contributions online on issues that demand fundraising by members in the community and minimizes the spread of fake news, gossip and pornography due to having well stipulated guidelines that govern what kind of information qualifies to be shared and infidelity since the members use their true names and identity. The main method of system development used was the waterfall approach. The programming tools used to develop and implement the system include Notepad++, MySQL, HTML, PHP and XAMPPv3.2.4. Despite the success that the WBCISS registered, it still had some limitations which can be a basis for future work as recommended by the researcher in this project report.