Community Bar
The Community Bar is a groupware tool supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small communities of intimate collaborators. Its conceptual design is primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, with extra details supplied by other theoretical model of awareness. It is also influenced by the Microsoft SideShow system: it displays basic awareness information in a space-conservative sidebar, and reveals progressively more information through a series of transient large tooltips and pop-up windows.
Contents
Download and Installation
- Download the latest version: Version 3.2.9 (updated 28 August, 2006)
NOTE: Make sure you also install Kim Tee's Screen Sharing Item
- Changes:
- media items expand automatically when there is space for them (unless they are locked)
- buttons on the media items (only visible when the mouse pointer is over the item) allow the items to be moved in the bar
- Old Versions
Recipes and How-To's
- CB server: How to set up your own community bar server
- View the video (AVI): How to use the Community Bar client
Tutorials and Examples
- Developing Community Bar Media Items
- CB code documentation Source code download and documentation of the code to help you make changes to CB.
Links
- Bug List
- Publications
- McEwan, G., Greenberg, S., Rounding, M. and Boyle, M. (2006) Groupware Plug-ins: A Case Study of Extending Collaboration Functionality through Media Items. (PDF). Proceedings of the CollabTech 2006 Conference (best paper nominee)
- McEwan, G., and Greenberg, S. (2005) Supporting Social Worlds with the Community Bar (PDF). Proceedings of the ACM Group 2005 Conference
- McEwan, G. and Greenberg, S. (2005) Community Bar Places for Collaboration (PDF). In Luigina Ciolfi, Geraldine Fitzpatrick and Liam Bannon (Eds) Workshop Proceedings Settings for Collaboration
- McEwan, G., and Greenberg, S. (2005) Community Bar (The Video) (AVI). Video Proceedings of ECSCW - European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Sept 18-22, Paris. Video, Duration 5:04)
- Gregor McEwan and Saul Greenberg. (2005) Community Bar: Designing for Awareness and Interaction (PDF). ACM CHI 2005 Workshop on Awareness systems Documentation