CoCollage C&T2009

Supporting Community in Third Places with Situated Social Software Joseph F. McCarthy 1 , Shelly D. Farnham 2 , Yogi Patel 1 , Sameer Ahuja 3 , William R. Hazlewood 4 , Daniel Norman 1 , Josh Lind 5 1 Strands Labs Seattle 2 Waggle Labs, 3 Virginia Tech, 4 Indiana Univ, 5 ReadyDone

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Agenda
The promise and problems of third places
Situated social software
The Strands Community Collage (CoCollage)
Study: impact on Trabant Coffee community
Neighboring factor of sense of community
Dependency factor of place attachment
Related, recent & future work
Communities, technology, commerce

Third Places
First Place: Home
Second Place: Work
Third Place: Community

Great, Good Places
The Great, Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
Ray Oldenburg, 1989
‘ homes away from home’, where unrelated people relate
the full spectrum of local humanity
inclusive sociability
ease of association

Characteristics of Third Places
On neutral ground
A leveler
Conversation is main activity
Accessibility and accommodation
Regulars
Low profile
Mood is playful
Home away from home

Promise of Third Places
Personal
Novelty
Perspective
Spiritual tonic
Friends by the set
Community
Political role
Habit of association
Agency of control and a force for good
Outposts on the public domain

Perils of [technology in] Third Places Cyber-nomads are “ hollowing out ” cafés that offer WiFi, rendering them “ physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated” leaving people “ more isolated than they would be if the café were merely empty.” -- James E. Katz, Professor of Communications, Rutgers University “Contextual effects” – Hampton, et al.

Local variations on the theme

How can technology enhance community within cafés? Three observations … and a solution

Maintaining Friendships through Online Social Media
ambient intimacy
“ being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to”
Leisa Reichert
http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/
http://www.slideshare.net/leisa/ambient-intimacy
continuous partial friendship
David Weinberger
http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-may04-07.html

Situated Software
Clay Shirky, March 2004
Software designed in and for a particular social situation or context
NOT Web School: scalability, generality, and completeness
the application must be useful to the community; the community must be useful to the application
http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
See also:
“ Communities, Audiences & Scale”
http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html
“ What is Social Informatics and Why Does It Matter?”
Rob Kling, D-Lib Magazine, January 1999
Socio-technical systems: people, technology, institutional & cultural contexts

Existing “technologies” for enhancing community in cafés

What if we could …
Leverage the attributes of offline community “technologies”
Photos, art, sketches, quotes, flyers
Apply situated software design principles
Design for the context of a café
Bring the richness of online social networking into the physical spaces we share with others
Spark conversation & connection in the real world
Ambient intimacy in physical spaces

The Strands Community Collage (CoCollage) A large computer display showing a collage of photos and quotes uploaded to a special web site by patrons and staff in a café or other community-oriented place.

CoCollage features People Stuff (photos & quotes) Commenting, voting Uploading Messaging The big screen

Sharing your stuff Facebook photos Quotes Flickr photos Photos from your computer Photos via email

Conversations & Connections Comment, vote, flag Public & private messages Online Offline

Initial deployment: Trabant Coffee

A favorite photo

Study 1
Good pace of adoption in first month
82 out of an estimated 400 regulars joined CoCollage
Questionnaire results shows that people who
a) are looking to connect with others
b) already have a psychological sense of community at the café
c) already feel place attachment to the café,
are more likely to join CoCollage and start conversations
Psychological sense of community for place and place attachment are meaningful constructs in predicting adoption of a place-based community technology
Measuring the Impact of Third Place Attachment on the Adoption of a Place-Based Community Technology Shelly D. Farnham, Joseph F. McCarthy, Yagnesh Patel, Sameer Ahuja, Daniel Norman, William R. Hazlewood, Josh Lind Proc. of the 27th Int'l. Conf on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009) , 2153 - 2156.

Study 2: Impact over time
How does CoCollage impact sense of community and place attachment over time?
2 months after initial deployment
Semi-structured interview with owners
Log analysis
Questionnaires
Study 1: After 1 week; 24 participants
Study 2: After 2 months; 19 participants (10 from study 1)
New questionnaire: 15 [mostly non-user] members of community

Size and Activity of Community
Owners are dedicated to developing a strong community, and have positive attitude towards technology
Café community:
Approx. 400 “regulars” visit at least once a week
48% male, 52% female, mean age = 29
23% students, 51% white collar/professional
Level of activity at cafe:
At any point in time, 17 people in the café
23 new people each hour
Stayed an average of 25 minutes each
Type of activities at cafe:
64% sat down to drink their coffee
38% came in with friends, chatted with each other
12% chatted with barista, 2 chatted across the table
Questionnaire:
Chatting with friends (65%),
reading (46%),
working on laptop (39%)

Usage after 1 month vs. 2 months Percentage of users who engaged in each type of activity, with means

Types of images shared Random sample of 150 images, after 2 months of use

Place Attachment & Neighboring
Dependency component of place attachment : the extent to which people rely on the café to have their needs met
Neighboring component of sense of community : the extent to which people visit each other’s homes and do each other favors
Place Attachment Neighboring

Examples of interactions?
coco has made me stare at the screen longer at peoples pictures. i usually get my drink in a mug so i can stay in Trabant and since im already there, i usually sit and study as well, whereas before, i would get a to-go drink and run off to the library.
It has greatly improved my people watching at Trabant. I think in some ways made me even bit more extroverted then I was before. I have enjoyed the feedback and comments both on the site and in person regarding my stuff

What do you like about CoCollage?
I like seeing everyone's pictures and how it makes Trabant feel like a little community .
Get to see what other Trabant customers are up to. Really get to see the diversity of U. District.
Some of the pictures are really lovely - and the kinds of photos overall tell a lot about Trabant’s style and that of their customers .
The friendly atmosphere it creates
its fun to add pictures to the collage while you're enjoying a cup of joe.
I love visiting with my friends there and looking up and seeing one of our pictures on the screen, then we get to talk about it. Its a great conversation piece .

What do you dislike about CoCollage?
get a bigger screen
i dislike that it becomes a centerpiece rather than part of the ambiance
Oddly, I feel more isolated at times by watching photos of people I don't know
From a user who rated increase in interactions as “6” and increase in sense of community as “7”

How can we improve CoCollage?
I wish I could switch past ugly, weird or bad photos and spend more time on the nice ones.
I would like rating scale to be able rank which pictures and stuff come up more often. Maybe an rfid card instead of swipe card to be able to tap and go to login. I would love to see it in more locations . Be able to rank my items for display .

What is CoCollage?
a social networking system bringing web 2.0 interaction to real life by allowing users to upload photos to a public display
Picture sharing. Picasa for your local coffee / espresso store
[The café]’s Facebook page is playing on a big screen.
innovative
funky
intrusion
a tv

Survey To what extent did CoCollage increase … * Interactions in café Sense of community in café
* on scale of 1 to 7, where 1 = “not at all” and 7 = “extremely so”
(81% > 1) (95% > 1)

Related Work

Related Work: Proactive Displays Augmenting the Social Space of an Academic Conference Joseph F. McCarthy, David W. McDonald, Suzanne Soroczak, David H. Nguyen and Al M. Rashid ACM 2004 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2004) Proactive Displays: Supporting Awareness in Fluid Social Environments David W. McDonald, Joseph F. McCarthy, Suzanne Soroczak, David H. Nguyen and Al M. Rashid ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interactions (TOCHI), Vol. 14, No. 4, January 2008 promoting awareness and interactions at a conference AUTOSPEAKERID, TICKET2TALK, NEIGHBORHOOD WINDOW

Related Work: Proactive Displays The Context, Content & Community (C3) Collage promoting awareness and interactions in the workplace The Context, Content & Community Collage: Sharing Personal Digital Media in the Physical Workplace Joseph F. McCarthy, Ben Congleton, F. Maxwell Harper ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008)

Related Work (1)
eyeCanvas (FXPAL)
Interactive community bulletin board
Canvas Gallery, SF
Churchill, et al. , CHI 2006
PlaceSite
Location-based web community
Three SF cafés
Savage, et al. , 2006
Jukola (Appliance Studio)
Mobile + wall displays
Selecting music in Bristol cafe
O’Hara, et al. , DIS 2004
CowCam (Intel)
Webcam + figurines + display
Urban Grind café, Portland
March, et al. , CHI 2005

Related Work: Research (2)
Notification Collage (University of Calgary)
Public display + desktop displays
University research lab
Greenberg & Rounding, CHI 2001
PlasmaPoster (FXPAL)
Interactive community bulletin board
Corporate, conference, café contexts
Churchill, Nelson, et al. , C&T 2003, …
BlueBoard (IBM Almaden)
Shared display for collaboration
Corporate meeting space
Russell & Gossweiler, UbiComp 2001
CityWall (Helsinki IIT)
Multi-touch screen in city center
Flickr photos tagged with “helsinki”
Interactions with, vs. through, display
Peltonen, et al. , CHI 2008

Meme Tags (MIT)
Wearable, interpersonal displays
Academic sponsor meetings
Borovoy, et al. , CSCW 1998
Opinionizer (Sussex)
Shared display at social events
Interaction through typed input
Brignull & Rogers, INTERACT 2003
Dynamo (Sussex)
High school setting
Interaction via USB disk
Brignull & Rogers, INTERACT 2003
AgentSalon (ATR)
Interaction via PalmGuides (PDAs)
Conversations mediated by animated agents
Sumi & Maase, Autonomous Agents 2001

Manhattan Story Mashup (Nokia)
Urban game: web + phones + screen
Times Square, New York
Tuulos, et al. , Pervasive 2007
ProD Framework for Proactive Displays (U. Mich)
Generic architecture for proactive displays
Congleton, et al. , UIST 2008
Twitterspace (Indiana University)
Large display in campus lounge
Dynamic visualization of group “tweets”
Hazlewood, et al. , PDC 2008
Public and Situated Displays O’Hara, Perry, Churchill, Russell

Related Work: Research (5) “ true mobiles” and “placemakers”

Related Work: Commercial Awareness / Interactions at Events Digital Signage Captivate TV ClearChannel, et al. RippleTV Danoo

Related Work: Atoms vs. Bits http://keepposted.com

Related Work: low tech wearables
Life as a grand experiment
Nametag worn daily since 2000
Front porch philosophy
Reciprocal self-disclosure
self disclosure is reciprocal respective to the level of intimacy that you have revealed
I’ll show you my name if you show me yours
http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/whats_in_a_name.html http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/reciprocal_self.html

OneKeyAway / MatchlinC
OneKeyAway
Singles mixers in LA / SF Bay area; since May 2004
Questionnaire:
64 true-false questions about sex, religion, drug use, how you spend your spare time, etc
“ I just want to get people together and talk about relationships … to discuss the questions, talk about their habits and personality traits. I think the device facilitates that.” – Edwin Duterte
MatchlinC: personality compatibility device
a mini “relationship advisor”
Infrared “zapping”
Three color codes (stoplight): red, amber, green)
Reminiscent of Lock & Key, Lovegety, Meme Tags

Nokia Sensor “ See and be Seen”

Related Work: Alone Together Two Hours of Joint Solitude http://www.coffeegeek.com/opinions/cafestage/10-19-2005 Alone Together http://blogs.parc.com/playon/

Recent developments

Future Work
Community characteristics / success metrics
Which types of communities have we been most successful in cultivating?
Technology
How can we improve CoCollage (better cultivation)?
Commerce
How do we create an economically sustainable model to support CoCollage?

Community characteristics
Greater awareness, interactions, relationships – between who?
Potential factors
Café (or other third place)
Size, location (neighborhood), longevity
Community
Size, regularity
Engagement: owners, staff, customers
Technology use: laptops, mobile phones, SMS, web, SNS
CoCollage
Placement, features (e.g., card reader)
Promotion by / within community
Community by the Numbers www.LifeWithAlacrity.com

Technology
How important is presence?
Sense & respond paradigm
Small group effect (Shirky)
Avoiding YASNS syndrome
More [engaged] users
Walk-up participation: Cammie
Community overview
Contests

Community-oriented advertising
Leveraging existing practices

Markets Are Conversations
“ The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell -- and to talk.”
“ Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.”
“ Conversation may be a distraction in factories that produce replaceable products for replaceable consumers, but it’s intimately tied to the world of craft, where the work of hands expresses the voice of the maker.”
“ People are talking in the new market because they want to, because they’re interested, because it’s fun.”

Thanks!
For more information:
mccarthy AT strands DOT com
http://cocollage.com
http://gumption.typepad.com
http://www.slideshare.net/gumption
Yogi Patel Tech Lead Shelly Farnham Research Consultant Joe McCarthy Principal Instigator Josh Lind Designer / Developer Dan Norman Design Lead Sameer Ahuja (former intern) Richie Hazlewood (former intern) Tyler Phillipi Bus Dev Manager

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CoCollage C&T2009

by Joe McCarthy on Jun 27, 2009

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CoCollage C&T2009 Presentation Transcript