Presentation given at Public Practices, Social Software: Examining social practices in networked publics, part of the Communities and Technology Conference 2007

1. BEV 2.0:
Virtual Town Square
Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Andrea Kavanaugh, Philip Eisenhour
Center for Human Computer Interaction,VT
John Tedesco
Communication Studies,VT
Bill Saunders, Luke Ward
Blacksburg Electronic Village
Jose Lombay, Mariheida Cordova
University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez

2. BEV 2.0 Goal: Create a
Virtual Town Square
• Provide interaction opportunities
• Support community development
• Attract traffic to the BEV site with
automatic content
• Make use of Web 2.0 and Social networking
ideas

3. Requirements for VTS
• Communication and interaction is at the
heart of any social group (online or offline)
• News & notices of local interest
• Calendar of events, maps, friends
• Groups and organizations

4. Communication
• Friends, Messages, Blogs, Email
• New plugins are possible

5. News
• Collect news from different
sources (Town, SWVA,
County, Roanoke Times,
Google News,Yahoo News)
and aggregate them at the VTS

6. Calendars
• Collect community, friends,
and personal calendars into a
single source of town events
• Allow subscription of calendar
in your desktop or your
Google Calendar
• Support mobile devices
(phones, PDAs)

7. Research Questions
• What practices emerge from the use of this
system? How do people make it their own?
• Will our current plan attract lots of users
to the site? Will using BEV existing
population be sufficient to expand its use?
• What is the relationship between usability
and sociability?