Abstract
Both of my projects are about the same broader sociotechnical problem: how to rideshare without stripping away trust, safety, and community in the process. My technical project focuses on a practical version of this problem at UVA, where students are in need of affordable and reliable ways to travel. My STS research looks at the broader social consequences of digital convenience platforms, especially how services like Uber and DoorDash can replace informal favors and weaken the small acts of reciprocity that sustain social capital. Together, these projects ask whether a platform can be engineered to solve this real coordination problem, without becoming socially inert.
My technical project investigated the problem of transportation for UVA students, namely those who do not have cars. Existing options like Uber, Lyft, and Amtrak are either too costly, too inflexible, or too slow, so many students fall back on Facebook groups and GroupMe chats to find rides to common destinations, often to no avail. My team designed Cavpool as a UVA-only ride-sharing app to address that gap. The app uses NetBadge authentication, structured ride posting and requesting, user profiles, ratings, emergency alerts, and Stripe payments to make rides more affordable and trustworthy. We evaluated it through requirements elicitation, prototyping, and beta testing with students. The main finding was that students liked the idea and found the platform more structured, safe, and usable than informal social media coordination, although testing also revealed some limitations around synchronization and error handling.
My STS project investigated a different but connected problem: what is lost when convenience platforms replace favor exchange with anonymized transactions. In that paper, I used literature on social capital, reciprocity, trust, and platform capitalism to argue the repercussions of our diminishing small favors economy. Asking a friend for a ride or help with a task reinforces the trust and mutual dependence vital to healthy communities. My evidence came from existing research on declining social capital, help-seeking behavior, generalized exchange, and the design of digital platforms. My main finding was that convenience platforms succeed partly because they reduce social discomfort, but in doing so they can displace the very interactions that make communities stronger. At the same time, I found that these platforms do fill real infrastructure gaps, so the goal should not be to reject them outright but to design alternatives that preserve coordination without fully eliminating the positive social outcomes
I think I contributed to this larger problem in a meaningful but limited way. My STS paper helped explain why this issue matters socially, and my technical project offered one small example of a platform designed with community trust more in mind than a standard commercial ride-sharing app. Still, Cavpool does not solve the whole problem. It only works in one university setting, and my STS research cannot prove that convenience platforms alone caused declining social capital. Future researchers should keep studying how platforms shape trust and reciprocity, but they should also build and test more systems like Cavpool that try to reengineer convenience platforms with social capital in mind.
I would like to thank Professor Caitlin Wylie for patiently advising me throughout my STS research process, as well as Professor Mark Sherriff and the CS capstone staff for supporting the technical side of this work. I am also grateful to my Cavpool teammates, Cole Popielec, Yovanny Vasquez, and Norah Alghamdi, and to the UVA students who shared their experiences and participated in testing.
