« back to Publications
Sun, Y. and Greenberg, S. (2010)
Places for Lightweight Group Meetings: The Design of Come Together. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work – ACM Group’2010. ACM Press, 10 pages, November 7-10.
Type: Refereed conference (full paper).
See also: Companion video as Report 2010-979-28.
Earlier version: Slightly different version as Report 2010-958-07.
DOI: 10.1145/1880071.1880111
Download as: Pdf
Additional download: 
Powerpoint
Abstract.
Lightweight group meetings are opportunistic, ad hoc, or lightly planned gatherings characterized by the informal nature of their members and their tasks. Critically, they must be very easy to set up and maintain over time. We contribute the design of Come Together, a system that supports lightweight, persistent meetings between distance-separated people. Its design is theoretically motivated by the Locales Framework, with features derived from the best of Instant Messengers and the Community Bar. Its main motivation is that any action must be simple and fast to do if it is to support lightweight group meetings. In particular, Come Together represents both people and their things as media items, which – unlike prior systems – can be quickly brought together to form an ad hoc place. Places, which are persistent, can be presented in a variety of forms (e.g., as a stand-alone window, or as an element in a sidebar), with interaction mechanisms that let a person quickly adjust the degree of awareness he or she wishes to maintain of the place and its contents. Somewhat akin to buddy lists, a console collects all people, artifacts, and places, where users can select them to rapidly compose meeting places.
Keywords: Ad hoc groups, awareness, casual interaction, groupware, places.