Gregor McEwan

Supporting social worlds with the community bar

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 Bars 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 persons lightweight management of his or her membership in multiple locales, as well as ones varying engagement with the people and artefacts within them.

An historical reflection of awareness in collaboration

Mutual awareness has been a focus point of research in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) since the early 1990s. At its essence, mutual awareness refers to a fundamental quality of collaborative work, the ability of co-workers to perceive each others’ activities and expressions and relate them to a joint context. In this chapter, we explore the history of awareness concepts by analysing existing literature in order to identify trends, research questions, research approaches and classification schemes throughout different stages of research into awareness. We have adopted a historical angle in the hope that it will allow us to show how awareness research has progressed over time. We document this development using three different phases: (1) Early exploration of awareness (approximately 1990–1994), (2) Diversification and research prototypes (approximately 1995–1999) and (3) Extended models and specialisation (approximately 2000–now). While these phases are to some extent arbitrary and overlapping, they allow us to highlight differences in research focus at the time and understand research in context.

A field study of community bar: (mis)-matches between theory and practice

Community Bar (CB) is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction. CBs design was derived from three sources: prior empirical research findings concerning informal awareness and casual interaction, a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, and the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. We conducted a field study of a groups on-going CB use. We use its results to reflect upon the matches and mis-matches that occurred between the theoretical and actual usage behaviors anticipated by our design principles vs. those observed in our deployment. As a critique, this reflectionis an important iterative step in recognizing flaws not just as usability problems, but as an incorrect translation of theory into design that can be re-analyzed from a theoretical perspective.

Groupware Plug-ins: A Case Study of Extending Collaboration Functionality through Media Items

Groupware normally offers only fixed functionality, which can be a poor match to the actual needs of particular group. We argue that groupware should be extensible by third party developers, and describe groupware plug-ins as a method that enables this. Using the Community Bar (CB) as a case study, we illustrate an easy-toprogram extensible groupware architecture. Unlike single user plug-ins, CB groupware plug-ins automatically share and populate a distributed data structure, using a distributed Model View Controller pattern to simplify programming. Several third party plugins illustrate what people can create in practice.

Presence disparity in mixed presence collaboration

We present the design of an experiment investigating presence disparity in mixed presence collaboration using digital tabletops. In an attempt to verify previous work and relate their results, we examined different presence representations of remote collaborators: audio, video, telepointers and video arms. Our early results show some interesting trends that we are currently investigating in more detail through further analysis of our data.

Understanding awareness in mixed presence collaboration

Mixed presence collaboration combines distributed and collocated collaboration -- there are multiple distributed sites, each with a collocated group. While collocated collaboration and purely distributed collaboration are each the subject of rich bodies of research, the combination is less well explored. In this paper we present our initial concepts of awareness support in mixed presence collaboration. We present this as a first version model of awareness. The selected literature we have used to inform the model is drawn from collocated research and distributed research as well as the small body of work addressing mixed presence collaboration directly. In this paper we present a discussion of this relevant literature and use it to explain our model. We also offer a sample of applying the model through the use of a scenario.

Understanding file access mechanisms for embedded Ubicomp collaboration interfaces

This paper explores the nature of interfaces to support people in accessing their files at tabletop displays embedded in the environment. To do this, we designed a study comparing peoples interaction with two very different classes of file system access interface: Focus, explicitly designed for tabletops, and the familiar hierarchical Windows Explorer. In our within-subjects double-crossover study, participants collaborated on 4 planning tasks. Based on video, logs, questionnaires and interviews, we conclude that both classes of interface have a place. Notably, Focus contributed to improved collaboration and more efficient use of the workspace than with Explorer. Our results inform a set of recommendations for future interfaces enabling this important class of interaction -- supporting access to files for collaboration at tabletop devices embedded in an ubicomp environment.

Reflecting on Several Metaphors of MUD-Based Media Spaces

Over the last decade, we designed and used three media spaces: Teamrooms, Notification Collage, and Community Bar. All were oriented towards creating a shared environment supporting a small community of people: about two to around twenty members were expected to inhabit the media space. All provided others with a sense of presence through portrait images and/or snapshot-based video of its members, and all emphasised creation and sharing of real-time groupware artefacts. They differed in that each was designed around a different metaphor: multiple rooms for Teamrooms, a shared live bulletin board for the Notification Collage, and an expandable sidebar that contained multiple places for Community Bar. This chapter briefly reflects on how the systems and their metaphors served as a communal place. We saw that many factors – both large and small – profoundly affected how these media spaces were adopted by the community. We also saw that there was a tension between the explicit structures offered by media space design (rooms, places, bulletin boards and so on) vs. the very light weight and often implicit ways that people form and reform into groups and how they attend to information in the real world. _____________________ S. Greenberg University of Calgary G. McEwan National ICT Australia, NICTA M. Rounding SMART Technologies, ULC A version of this paper will appear in: