This talk has been cancelled do to illness. Those interested are invited to join the MOCHI officers at Good Time Charley's on South University at 6pm for dinner and conversation.

Social Proxies: Representing Presence and Designing for Awareness in
On-line Communities

Christine A. Halverson
Social Computing Group
IBM T.J. Watson and Almaden Research Centers
home page

7:00pm
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
411 West Hall (Ehrlicher Room) directions...

IBM is a globally distributed company of >350,000. Although half are in North America the rest are distibuted through the rest of the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. As the economy dips, IBM like other companies, is becoming ever more careful of travel expenses; resorting to a number of virtual means to replace face to face meetings.

Our group has focused on providing individual social cues online that enhance the online experience. This is a step beyond the task based aspects of giving people a place to meet on line, talk, and share documents. We've implemented our ideas in a series of applications focused on smaller groups (under 25 at a time) and have experience expanding this to larger groups ranging from 50 people to thousands.

How do you design to foster connections and awareness between people on such a range of scales? I'll present a number of options we have tried -- including presenting awareness of others online via visualizations (social proxies) scaled to group size, tieing awareness to task phases, and moving away from technology by supplementing it with human facilitated connections.

About the Speaker

Christine Halverson is a Research Staff Member in the Social Computing Group at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. Her current work involves studying online systems to understand how they support social and community processes in groups and organizations. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego and is the author of a number of papers in the fields of HCI and CSCW.