supporting social worlds with the community bar
The Community Bar is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small social worlds: a group of people with a common purpose. Its conceptual design is primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, with extra details supplied by the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. Design nuances are strongly influenced by observations and feedback supplied by a community who had been using both the Community Bar and its Notification Collage predecessor for a total of five years. As a consequence, Community Bar's design supports how communities of ad-hoc and long-standing groups are built and sustained within multiple locales: places that offer a group the site and means for maintaining awareness of one another and for rapidly moving into interaction. This includes a person's lightweight management of his or her membership in multiple locales, as well as ones varying engagement with the people and artefacts within them.
social communities groupware group informal awareness casual interaction interaction conceptual design design theory locales framework locality focus/nimbus model observability feedback notification ad-hoc place management engagement  framework 