We introduce a programming environment entitled Share that is designed to encourage loosely bound cooperation between individuals within communities of practice through the sharing of code. Loosely bound cooperation refers to the opportunity community members have to assist and share resources with one another while maintaining their autonomy and independent practice. We contrast this model with forms of collaboration that enable large numbers of distributed individuals to collaborate on large scale works where they are guided by a shared vision of what they are collectively trying to achieve. We hypothesize that providing fine-grained, publicly visible attribution of code sharing activity within a community can provide socially motivated encouragement for code sharing. We present an overview of the design of our tool and the objectives that guided its design and a discussion of a small-scale deployment of our prototype among members of a particular community of practice.

In this paper, we describe backchan.nl, a web based backchannel system that focuses on providing greater audience participation during question and answer sessions. The system allows audience members to use a web-based service to propose questions and comments, and to vote on the questions of others. Top rated submissions are projected into the presentation space where audience members, moderators, and panelists can see them. We discuss the results of deploying this system at many different kinds of conferences and relate those results to the particular design of our system, demonstrating how backchannel systems can be more than just shared chat rooms. From our experience with this work, we discuss the broader implications of configurable mediated social spaces and how subtle design decisions can influence user experience

Humans use fashion signals to indicate access to information. While fashion is typically associated with clothing, fashion also transpires within the domain of electronic media: weblogs, discussion lists, and online communities teem continuously with fresh, digestible content. A fashionable status - well-informed and well-connected - is demonstrated through a consistent, timely, and meaningful display of newly acquired information. While production constraints of material-based fashions limit the signal refresh rate, ephemeral electronic fashions can cycle as quickly as the flow of information. The challenge we present is to develop physical objects that can go beyond the limitations of their materiality, and to signal with the rapidity of electronic fashions. We introduce the design of urbanhermes as a communicative accessory that integrates the fresh, dynamic, fluid nature of electronic-based fashion signals within the tactile, face-to-face environment of a physical space. This paper presents the design discussion within the framework of fashion as a social signal.

We present Themail, a visualization that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. Using the content of exchanged messages, it shows the words that characterize one's correspondence with an individual and how they change over the period of the relationship.This paper describes the interface and content-parsing algorithms in Themail. It also presents the results from a user study where two main interaction modes with the visualization emerged: exploration of "big picture" trends and themes in email (haystack mode) and more detail-oriented exploration (needle mode). Finally, the paper discusses the limitations of the content parsing approach in Themail and the implications for further research on email content visualization.

In this paper we present experimental results rating the experience of users conversing in a casual video/audio dialogue, in a simulated home environment. Here video-realistic images are problematic and prone to numerous "medium effects", such as unaligned eye-gaze, which can be misattributed as personal flaws. We tested three levels of manipulated video to see if they improved user's sense of: (a) presence, (b) portrayal and (c) preference. By blurring the background we found a manipulation that is both preferred and more efficiently coded than the original.

Telemurals is an abstract audio-video installation that seeks to initiate and sustain interaction between and within two remote spaces. Our goal is to improve the social aspects of casual mediated communications by incorporating events into the design of the communication medium that encourage people to engage in interaction when they otherwise would not. We call these events social catalysts, for they encourage people to initiate and sustain interaction. In this paper we discuss the design process and goals of our first Telemurals link between two public spaces, the building of Telemurals, and an ethnographic study describing how the system affected interaction between and within these two spaces based on the theories discussed in this paper.

Poker is largely a game of social and psychological information. However, online card room interfaces do not support the subtle communication between players that is integral to the psychological aspect of the game, making the games less authentic and less enjoyable than they could be. We explore how card room interfaces can better support the psychological aspects of the game by critiquing the dominant methods of visualizing players: with generic avatars, and with text-only handles.

Internet-based "online robots" now provide public access to remote locations such as museums and laboratories. The Tele-Actor is a collaborative online teleoperation system for distance learning that allows many students to simultaneously share control of a single mobile resource. Our goal is to preserve the educational advantages of field trips without the drawbacks of group travel. We propose the "spatial dynamic voting" (SDV) interface for multiple operator single robot (MOSR) teleoperation. The SDV collects, displays, and analyzes a sequence of spatial votes from multiple online operators at their Internet browsers. The votes drive the motion of a single mobile robot or human "Tele-Actor". The paper describes Version 3.0 of the system architecture, SDV interface, algorithms for automated goal selection, and metrics for collaboration and leadership. We report results from a July 2001 field test with 56 remote users.

This paper presents Talking in Circles, a multimodal audioconferencing environment whose novel design emphasizes spatial grounding with the aim of supporting naturalistic group interaction behaviors. Participants communicate primarily by speech and are represented as colored circles in a two-dimensional space. Behaviors such as subgroup conversations and social navigation are supported through circle mobility as mediated by the environment and the crowd and distance-based attenuation of the audio. The circles serve as platforms for the display of identity, presence and activity: graphics are synchronized to participants' speech to aid in speech-source identification and participants can sketch in their circle, allowing a pictorial and gestural channel to complement the audio. We note user experiences through informal studies as well as design challenges we have faced in the creation of a rich environment for computer-mediated communication.

No abstract available.

Although current online chat environments provide new opportunities for communication, they are quite constrained in their ability to convey many important pieces of social information, ranging from the number of participants in a conversation to the subtle nuances of expression that enrich face to face speech. In this paper we present Chat Circles, an abstract graphical interface for synchronous conversa-tion. Here, presence and activity are made manifest by changes in color and form, proximity-based filtering intuitively breaks large groups into conversational clusters, and the archives of a conversation are made visible through an integrated history interface. Our goal in this work is to create a richer environment for online discussions.

Many on-line interaction environments have a large number of users. It is difficult for the participants, especially new ones, to form a clear mental image about those with whom they are interacting. How can we compactly convey information about these participants to each other? We propose the data portrait, a novel graphical representation of users based on their past interactions. Data portraits can inform users about each other and the overall social environment. We use a flower metaphor for creating individual data portraits, and a garden metaphor for combining these portraits to represent an on-line environment. We will review previous work in visualizing both individuals and groups. We will then describe our visualizations, explain how to create them, and show how they can be used to address user questions.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.