Bill Segall

Supporting disconnectedness - transparent information delivery for mobile and invisible computing

As computing devices become ubiquitous and increasingly mobile, it is becoming apparent that the directed peer-to-peer communication model has shortcomings for many forms of distributed interprocess communication. Undirected communication, including content-based messaging, is becoming increasingly common. The paper examines the issues involved in supporting content based messaging to both mobile devices and users using a combination of connected and mobile (possibly disconnected) devices. These issues include persistence, multi-client shared subscriptions, non-destructive notification receipt, and notification expiry. The discussion is placed in the context of the development of a proxy-server to provide disconnectedness support for the Elvin content-based messaging service.

Augmenting the workaday world with Elvin

This paper addresses the problem of providing effective, computer-based support for awareness and interaction in the distributed workaday world We report the story of how our content-based pure notification service, called Elvin, became widely adopted in our organisation and elsewhere, augmenting the virtual work environment, and providing perceptual resources for awareness. Examples of its uses include support for interaction via bi-directional chat-like facilities as well as support for uni-directional notifications, for example push-based information from services such as WWW and email, and notifications of the activities of others through rooms bookings, version control changes, and so on. These uses have had a significant impact on the way people interact with information sources and on social cohesion within the organisation. The attraction of Elvin lies in its conceptual simplicity, absence of built-in policy, expressive power and multilingual range of simple APIs. Its uptake is largely a result of the Tickertape Elvin client, which provides a simple, compelling interface usable in numerous different situations. We contend that even though it does not try to be a collaboration-friendly notification service, Elvin is paradoxically very useful for collaborative awareness and interaction support.

Supporting Public Availability and Accessibility with Elvin: Experiences and Reflections

We provide a retrospective account of how a generic event notification service called Elvin and a suite of simple client applications: CoffeeBiff, Tickertape and Tickerchat, came to be used within our organisation to support awareness and interaction. After overviewing Elvin and its clients, we outline various experiences from data collated across two studies where Elvin and its clients have been used to augment the workaday world to support interaction, to make digital actions visible, to make physical actions available beyond the location of action, and to support content and socially based information filtering. We suggest there are both functional and technical reasons for why Elvin works for enabling awareness and interaction. Functionally, it provides a way to produce, gather and redistribute information from everyday activities (via Elvin) and to give that information a perceptible form (via the various clients) that can be publicly available and accessible as a resource for awareness. The integration of lightweight chat facilities with these information sources enables awareness to easily flow into interaction, starting to re-connect bodies to actions, and starting to approximate the easy flow of interaction that happens when we are co-located. Technically, the conceptual simplicity of the Elvin notification, the wide availability of its APIs, and the generic functionality of its clients, especially Tickertape, have made the use of the service appealing to developers and users for a wide range of uses.

Tickertape: awareness in a single line

This paper describes an awareness tool called Tickertape. Tickertape is a lightweight, highly tailorable tool that provides an interface to a world of transient information via a single-line scrolling message window. We overview Tickertape, describing both its unidirectional and bidirectional message groups and its time-out feature. We then illustrate how it is being used within one organisation.

Tickertape: notification and communication in a single line

This paper outlines an awareness application called Ticketape. Tickertape is a tool that displays event notifications in the form of scrolling messages across a single-line window. The Tickertape message window provides an interface to a world of highly tailorable transient information. We provide an overview of Tickertape features and then discuss its specific use within a semi-commercial research organisation. We note that although Tickertapes evolution was incidental rather than purposeful, it is being extensively used within our organisation. Usage data and interviews suggest that there is a select core group of users who use Tickertape for both work and leisure. Other more casual users use the tool sporadically for leisure purposes only. We highlight our current goal which is to optimise Tickertape usage within the work environment. Our long-term vision involves the incorporation of Tickertape into Orbit-Gold, our collaborative working environment and to make the tool accessible to external organisations.