The Community Board: Building Local Community

Balakrishna ChennupatiAdvisor: Eli Blevis

Motivation

Declining Social Interaction

Impact of Social Interaction

• Lower Crime• Economic Prosperity• Better Health• Child Development

The Problem

Create Online Interaction that facilitates

Offline Interaction.

Method

• Literature Review• Ethnographic Study• Review of existing Technologies• Ideation• Design Critique

Literature Review

P. Kollock. Design Principles for Online Communities. Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society, 1996.

• Repeated Social Interaction• A Persistent Identity

Millen, D. R. and Patterson, J. F. Stimulating social engagement in a community network. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, November 16 - 20, 2002). CSCW '02. ACM, New York, NY, 306-313.

• Familiarity with other communication technologies drives participation.

• People who spend non-work time socializing and on internet activities participate more.

• Politically charged discussions increase participation.

Dieberger, A., Dourish, P., Hook, K., Resnick, P., and

Wexelblat, A. Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems. interactions 7, 6 (Nov. 2000), 36-45.

• Users’ awareness of each other contributes to creating a social experience.

• Informs the users of appropriate behaviors.

• The space becomes more alive and inviting.

Churchill, E. F., Nelson, L., Denoue, L., Helfman, J., and

Murphy, P Sharing multimedia content with interactive public displays: a case study. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Designing interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques (Cambridge, MA, USA, August 01 – 04, 2004). DIS '04. ACM, New York, NY, 7-16.

Zhao, Q. A. and Stasko, J. T. What's happening?: the community awareness application. In CHI '00 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (The Hague, The Netherlands, April 01 - 06, 2000). CHI '00. ACM, New York, NY, 253-254.

Resnick, Paul and Vishant Shah. Photo Directories: A Tool for Organizing Sociability in Neighborhoods and Organizations. Working paper, September 2002.

• A leader produces the photo directory– Makes use of his natural sociability.

• A way for individuals to signal willingness.

• Creates a sense of group identity.

Ethnographic Study

The Study

• Interviewed 6 people– 4 women and 2 men

• Questions Asked– Who do you know in the neighborhood?– How did you meet them ?– Do you want to know your neighbors?– Did you see any signs of your neighbors?– Do you participate in neighborhood activities?

Findings

• People are busy and think neighborhood interactions are a demand on time and privacy.

• People meet other people when they have a common interest.

• People want purposeful interactions.

Findings

• Interactions happen in Public Space– On the Porch, Street or in Public Events.– Some people are not comfortable having people

visit them at home.

• Acquaintance takes time.– Some people are active and know a lot of

people.

• House ownership affects participation.

Review of Existing Social Networking Sites

Social Networking Sites

General Social Networking

Neighborhood

Activity/Interest

Location Based

General Awareness Blogs

SF zero

Twitter

Insights for Design

Increasing awareness of neighbors promotes interaction.

Creating a persistent identity increases awareness.

Need for a quick way to participate.

Engage everyone, including tenants and short-term residents.

Make use of active residents to foster connections.

Provide recognizable incentive for participating.

Provide opportunities for offline interaction.

Enable people to meet people of similar interest.

The Design:The Community Board

Website + Public Display

awareness

Registrationquick way

Posting Content

in the campus|

quick way

Content

Contentrecognizable incentive

engage everyone

Contentpersistent identity

active residents

similar interest

Contentengage everyone

Contentoffline interaction

Event Awarenessoffline interaction

Making Friends

offline interaction

Verifying Authenticity

active residents

Critique & Discussion

• Usability– People not currently using existing services.– A board that’s separate from the site.

• Privacy

Conclusion

Thank you.

Eli BlevisErik Stolterman

Kathleen CostelloHCI Classmates

All the HCI Faculty

Questions ?