Places for Lightweight Group Meetings: The Design of Come Together

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. See companion video, Report 2010-979-28. Earlier slightly different version as Report 2010-958-07.

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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 a system called Come Together, which 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. The main motivation is that 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 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. A console collects all people, artifacts, and places in a manner akin to buddy lists, where these components can be used to rapidly compose the meeting place.

Keywords

Ad hoc groups, awareness, casual interaction, groupware, places

Bibtex entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { 2010-ComeTogether.Group,
CLASS = { CONFARTICLE },
AUTHOR = { Sun, Y. and Greenberg, S. },
TITLE = { Places for Lightweight Group Meetings: The Design of Come Together },
YEAR = { 2010 },
MONTH = { November 7-10 },
BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work - ACM Group'2010 },
PUBLISHER = { ACM Press },
PAGES = { 10 pages },
KEYWORDS = { Ad hoc groups, awareness, casual interaction, groupware, places },
NOTE = { See companion video, Report 2010-979-28. Earlier slightly different version as Report 2010-958-07 },
}