TY - JOUR
AU1 - Stathis,, Kostas
AU2 - Purcell,, Patrick
AB - In a world of virtual and real communities, this special issue of ‘Interacting with Computers’ focuses on the real. The issue addresses the communication needs of physical co-located communities, those lay people who may live next-door, frequent the local pub, send their children to the same school, or bump into each other intermittently at meetings of local societies or professional associations. This is then the world of informal and spontaneous interactions located in a set of concentric patterns of personal, familial, social and civic circles. The context represents a major challenge for the profession of human–computer interaction to construct information technologies that support the interactions of ordinary people in these social settings. With pervasive internetworking, computers have become an extremely effective and economic means by which people communicate. A new generation of applications further challenges computer software to serve as the intermediary between people, to both facilitate and sustain their social relationships. Indeed, a group of such applications under the umbrella of social computing (Schuler, 1994), focuses on the relationships between people when workplace tasks are defined via software in organisations, when people learn and teach with computers, when governments devise and implement policies over networks and when people interact socially in the context of modern community lifestyles. Community-based interactive systems (Stathis and Purcell, 2001) may arguably be amongst the most topical, and technically interesting areas of development in information and communication technology today. They are certainly the most socially significant. Such systems act as the new connective tissue of a modern genre of digitally linked communities. These communities can vary enormously in scale, both in character and organisational goals, which can vary from grass roots political activism to enhancing communication between the citizen and the local municipality. The idea is not as odd as it sounds, that citizens may use such advanced communication infrastructure to connect with and share experiences with their next-door neighbours, or indeed between members of the same family. Rather a major focus of current development is on the role of devices/appliances (Norman, 1999) (whether portable, mobile, or fixed), which incorporate the appropriate software capabilities to support local residents in performing their social activities and putatively enhance community spirit—the neighbourhood esprit de corps! The availability of different devices with which people interact leads to a number of important questions concerning their various functions, levels of efficiency and the complexity of associated information models. Stated succinctly, there is a growing need to endow the user interface with the requisite level of ‘intelligence’ which both masks the complexity of a given information model and concomitantly, promotes facility of use. Although the task of building such intelligent interaction devices requires a substantial amount of technical investment, the methodological stance being adopted in this special issue of Interacting with Computers is that technology is not an end in itself, but instead is a way of serving and mediating between people in their various roles as members of a local neighbourhood. Subject matter in this special issue touches upon those broad topics which indicate real promise to empower the online citizen, or promote social cohesion in the community or, in general, will point to the potential of advanced work in information and communication technologies to benefit society. The invited papers identify this potential from the perspectives of, sociology, human factors, computation and management, amongst others. Although varied in their approach and methodology, they are all related by their common goal of understanding and building community-based systems, in which there is an emphasis on interaction design, or intelligence modelling, or both. The special issue starts with the work of Beeson who develops an approach for building information systems whose purpose is to express (rather than regulate) the life of a community group. The story of a community group, as understood and told by its members, is taken as the basis for building a computer system that reflects the life of the community. The paper argues that development of the system is seen as an open-ended process of discovery, collaboration and experiential learning. Engagement with the technology is understood as a ‘tactical’ practice on the part of the users. A fieldwork exercise is also provided along these lines with one community group, in which the group used hypermedia technology to make a shared story. Aspects of process and form in story making on a computer, in this project and more generally, are discussed. To show how to develop a community-based system that allows people to express the activities of a community, Stathis, deBruijn and Macedo present the development of the Living Memory system. The specific aim of this system is to provide intelligent information interfaces for local communities that are digitally connected. In particular, this work studies the task of effective information management arising from social interaction when a diverse range of computing devices is employed. The approach is based on combining innovative interactive devices with software agent technology, to obtain a system that provides an effective flow of community-related content for the people of a given locality. The authors argue that a critical amount of community content, such as announcements of important local events and public notices, could provide a crucial context for community interactions in the form of a communal memory—hence the project's title. To disseminate this memory, the authors have integrated existing techniques for information retrieval and filtering with measures of content popularity, to ensure that documents in the communal memory are optimally available to individuals. After presenting some examples of the kind of access terminals people could interact with, they report on the development of a connected community system in which agents provide a number of services aimed at facilitating personalised and location-dependent access to the communal memory. A natural question to ask about digitally linked local communities is how do such communities interact with other communities. Agostini et al. present Campiello, a system supporting the exchange of information among communities living in culture rich cities, and between these indigenous communities and foreign visitors. The aim of this work is to build a network for empowering existing communities as well as providing one that tries to bring different communities together. Campiello works on two levels: opening the boundaries of a given community and reinforcing the sense of membership in that community. The paper focuses on the reinforcement of local communities, to allow us to draw lessons that are valid not only for art cities, but for local communities in general. The paper also reports on the experience of using the resulting system in the city of Venice. In Venice, the loss of identity and the weakening of local communities is a dramatic social problem. As a result the city represents a good case to understand the characteristics of the problem, since it is more serious and visible than in many other cities. On a different vein, Sumi and Mase describe the temporal formation of communities that have long-term membership. For this purpose, they introduce an ongoing attempt to build a community-based system by presenting a project for the provision of digital assistants to support participants in an academic conference. The work is based on an experiment that provided participants at the conference with a personal assistant system with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies and thereby facilitated communication among the participants. The same experiment also made online services available via the Web to encourage the participants to continue their relationships even after the conference. Their paper introduces the system that was provided during the experiment and reports on the results of how people interacted with the system and the devices. Kamei et al. present and discuss Community Organizer, a system designed to focus on the networked part of a community. The main characteristic of community organizer is the use of spatial representations for the relationships among community members including the communications exchanged between these members. These spatial representations reflect the degree of closeness of interests and concerns among the members, and are intended to provide users with clues on how to form networked communities. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed spatial representations, the authors conducted experiments with two different versions of the software. One version offered meaningful spatial representations while the other version did not. The subjects who used the former software version felt a greater sense of ‘community’, enjoyed using the software more, and actively used it longer than the subjects using the latter software version (control condition). These results indicated that the proposed spatial representations are effective in supporting network community formation. But can the interests, concerns and behaviours of a community be discovered in a systematic way? Paliouras et al. argue for the usefulness of constructing communities of users with common behaviours, making use of machine learning techniques. Their work assumes that the users of any service on the Internet constitute a large community and their aim is to construct smaller communities of users with common characteristics as an enhancing tactic. The paper presents the results of three case studies for three different types of Internet service: a digital library, an information broker and a website. Particular attention is paid to the different types of information access involved in the three case studies: query-based information retrieval, profile-based information filtering and website navigation. Each type of access imposes different constraints on the representation of the learning task. The analysis of the results in the three case studies brings to surface some of the important properties of the task, suggesting the feasibility of a common methodology for the three different types of information access on the Internet. To conclude, the aim of this special issue has been to present a selection of current work with the aim of designing and specifying intelligence and interaction in community-based systems. The work presented includes studies that discuss how to use existing communication infrastructures to support new forms of human–computer interaction by lay users whose interaction with other people is augmented by a wide range of networked devices. Devices in the network enable intelligent interactions through the use of software agents that manage the interaction of individuals or the community as a whole. The results presented indicate that community-based systems is an emergent and growing domain of application, facilitating interaction and communication amongst laypeople, irrespective of age, gender or technical competence. Acknowledgements As guest editors we wish to thank our reviewers whose comments allowed us to select the papers that appear in this special issue: Oscar deBruijn, Tom Carey, John Caroll, Liz Churchill, Robert Macredie, Gord McCalla, Ana Paiva, Thomas Rist, Mary Beth Rosson, Bob Spence, and Francesca Toni. We also wish to thank the editors of the Interacting with Computers Journal, Gilbert Cockton and Dianne Murray, for their support and professional way in which they managed all our queries while compiling the papers for this issue. References Schuler, 1994 Schuler D. Special issue on social computing Communications of the ACM 37 ( 4 ) 1994 Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Stathis and Purcell, 2001 Stathis K. Purcell P. Special issue on localnets: environments for community-based interactive systems Telematics and Informatics 18 ( 1 ) 2001 Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Norman, 1999 Norman D. , The Invisible Computer 1999 MIT Press , Cambridge Author notes 1 URL: http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~kostas. 2 URL: http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/hp/staff/purcell.html. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All right reserved.
TI - Intelligence and interaction in community-based systems
JF - Interacting with Computers
DO - 10.1016/S0953-5438(02)00013-9
DA - 2002-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/intelligence-and-interaction-in-community-based-systems-0hoLwPQKC9
SP - 639
EP - 642
VL - 14
IS - 6
DP - DeepDyve
ER -