What's Happening?: Promoting Community Awareness through Opportunistic, Peripheral Interfaces

Abstract

Maintaining an awareness of information about one's own community and its members is viewed as being important, but is becoming more challenging today as people are overwhelmed by so many different forms of information. We have developed the "What's Happening" suite of tools to help convey relevant and interesting community information to people in a manner that is minimally distracting and disruptive, with little or no user set-up and interaction. The tools are more lightweight than e-mail and Usenet news, and opportunistic in providing information to people when they are not deeply focused on some other task. This paper describes these tools and the techniques that they use, as well as our observations of their utility and impact.