Supporting Social Worlds with the Community Bar
September 6th, 2005
Gregor McEwan and Saul Greenberg
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.
The above figure shows the Community Bar running on the side of the user’s desktop showing colleagues in several locales.
For more information
- McEwan, G., and Greenberg, S. (2005) Supporting Social Worlds with the Community Bar. Proceedings of the ACM Group 2005 Conference, (Nov 6-9, Sanibel Island, Florida), ACM Press.
- McEwan, G., and Greenberg, S. (2005) Community Bar (The Video). Video Proceedings of ECSCW - European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Sept 18-22, Paris. Video and 2-page summary, Duration 5:04.
- Contact Gregor mcewan@cpsc.ucalgary.ca
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