Supporting Informal Group Communication

Problem

Generally speaking, informal communication is the casual inter-personal interaction that, to some degree, happens by chance. For example, two people start a chat about the World Series by bumping into one another in the hallway. Such activities provide people opportunities to know (more of) others, help resolving some work-related problems, and sometimes may lead to collaboration among the participants of the interactions. For example, the hallway chat may inspire a joint project investigating user interfaces for delivering sports scores on the desktop. In summary, informal communication is of crutial importance to the creative work in a scientific research community.

Unfortunately, in a large and distributed community such as the College of Computing, the condition of physical proximity that naturally affords informal communication can not always be met. Here, faculty and students are mostly spread among three physically separated locations: the College of Computing building (CCB), the Centennial Research Building (CRB), and the Georgia Center for Advanced Telecommunication Technologies (GCATT). Casual encounters among people in different buildings are becoming less frequent. Also as this community grows larger, people are becoming less likely to know much about what is happening in the greater community. All of these will increase the unfamiliarity within the community and likely hinder the progress of many collaborative efforts.

How can technology support informal group communication in the College of Computing community?

Project Tasks

1. Read the reading materials and meet with Alex to discuss the scope of this project.

2. Participate in a simple media space [1], the electric lounge (Alex can show you how to use the programs). Experiment with the different privacy-preserving modes available [3].

   If you don't have any experience with buddy-list applications, check out Ding! which is available on CoC Solaris2 systems by running

           /usr/local/public/bin/ding
   

   If you don't have any experience with on-line communities, check out MediaMOO [2].

3. Identify some problems in using these different kinds of systems to support informal group communication: Do you use them to find people? Do you use them to interact with other people? What makes it easy or hard to do so?

4. Develop a set of requirements that you think are the most important in supporting informal communication (a lame example would be, "the system must run on Unix machines"). Design an alternative interface and/or visualization to solve a specific and significant problem. This design should be implementable and affordable in today's computing environment. Draw diagrams and storyboards to illustrate your design.

5. Are there any limitations in what we can do (to support informal group communication) on desktops? If so, what are they, and how should we deal with them?

Background Reading

1. Bly, S.A., Harrison, S.R. and Irwin, S. Media Spaces: Bringing People Together in a Video, Audio, and Computing Environment. Communications of the ACM, vol. 36, no. 1, 28-47. ACM, 1993.

2. Bruckman, A., and Resnick, M. The MediaMOO Project: Constructionism and Professional Community. Convergence, 1:1, 1995.

3. Zhao, Qiang A. and Stasko, John T. The Awareness-Privacy Tradeoff in Video Supported Informal Awareness: A Study of Image-Filtering Based Techniques. Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, Technical Report GIT-GVU-98-16, June 1998.