Places for Lightweight Group Meetings: The Design of Come Together
Date
2010-05-17T15:43:42Z
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Abstract
Lightweight group meetings are opportunistic, ad hoc, or lightly
planned gatherings characterized by the informal nature of their
members and their tasks. Critically, they must be very easy to set
up and maintain over time. We contribute the design of a system
called Come Together, which supports lightweight, persistent
meetings between distance-separated people. Its design is
theoretically motivated by the Locales Framework, with features
derived from the best of Instant Messengers and the Community
Bar. The main motivation is that that any action must be simple
and fast to do if it is to support lightweight group meetings. In
particular, Come Together represents both people and their things
as media items, which can be quickly brought together to form an
ad hoc place. Places, which are persistent, can be presented in a
variety of forms (e.g., as a stand-alone window, or as an element
in a sidebar), with interaction mechanisms that let a person
quickly adjust the degree of awareness he or she wishes to
maintain of the place and its contents. A console collects all
people, artifacts, and places in a manner akin to buddy lists,
where these components can be used to rapidly compose the
meeting place.
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Keywords
Design, Human Factors, Computer-supported collaborative work