Supporting Social Worlds with the Community Bar

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. Earlier version as Report 2005-789-20, May.

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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 NotificatiNotification 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.

Bibtex entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { 2005-CommunityBar.Group,
CLASS = { CONFARTICLE },
AUTHOR = { McEwan, G. and Greenberg, S. },
TITLE = { Supporting Social Worlds with the Community Bar },
BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the Conference on Supporting Group Work - ACM GROUP'05 },
YEAR = { 2005 },
MONTH = { November 6-9 },
PAGES = { 21-30 },
PUBLISHER = { ACM Press },
DOI = { http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1099203.1099207 },
ADDRESS = { Sanibel Island, Florida },
NOTE = { Earlier version as Report 2005-789-20, May },
}