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McEwan, G. and Greenberg, S. (2005)
Supporting Social Worlds with the Community Bar. In Proceedings of the Conference on Supporting Group Work – ACM GROUP’05. (Sanibel Island, Florida), ACM Press, pages 21-30, November 6-9.
Type: Refereed conference (full paper).
Earlier version: Report 2005-789-20, May.
Additional materials: powerpoint presentation.
DOI: 10.1145/1099203.1099207
Download as: Pdf
DOI: 10.1145/1099203.1099207
Download as: Powerpoint – file is too large to preview
Abstract.
The Community Bar is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small social worlds: a group of people with a common purpose. Its conceptual design is primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, with extra details supplied by the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. Design nuances are strongly influenced by observations and feedback supplied by a community who had been using both the Community Bar and its Notification Collage predecessor for a total of five years. As a consequence, Community Bar’s design supports how communities of ad-hoc and long-standing groups are built and sustained within multiple locales: places that offer a group the site and means for maintaining awareness of one another and for rapidly moving into interaction. This includes a person’s lightweight management of his or her membership in multiple locales, as well as ones varying engagement with the people and artefacts within them.
Keywords: Casual interaction, Locales Framework, focus/nimbus, groupware.