Supporting social worlds with the community bar

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.

Grounding interpersonal privacy in mediated settings

“…The two interactive grounding mechanisms mentioned have been implemented as extensions of an existing groupware application, the Community Bar [7]. Community Bar (CB) is a groupware system that supports awareness and casual interaction of small communities.…”

Interactive and Lightweight Mechanisms to Coordinate Interpersonal Privacy in Mediated Communication

“…By displaying relevant information about a social network, such systems can, for example, help users to engage in casual interaction with their community [2] or to elicit feelings of connectedness within long-distance family members [1]. However, users of such systems often struggle with the practicalities of keeping their interactions at a desired level [3].…”

“…The mechanisms were deployed as extensions of an existing groupware application, Community Bar (CB) [2]. The original CB was modified so the system will assign a distinctive colour to each user, and incoming messages in the chat window will be coloured according to the sender's colour.…”

Sharing Domestic Life through Long-Term Video Connections

“…Installations comprised dedicated devices and hardware that just displayed the video link (in contrast to a workstation that would be used for various purposes). Second, many media spaces were designed to provide connections between workplace offices or cubicles [Coutaz et al 1998, Mantei et al 1991, Dourish 1993, Dourish et al 1996, Greenberg and Rounding 2001, McEwan and Greenberg 2005. For example, CAVECAT connected multiple co-workers' offices with always-on video, mostly of each person working at his or her desk [Mantei et al 1991].…”