Putting the There There

1. The Community Since late 1997 my colleagues and I have been working with an ever-evolving program called "Babble." Babble is system that is a cross between a multi-channel textual chat system and an asynchronous textual bulletin board system, with a lightweight graphical awareness mechanism thrown in. The intent of the system is to support everyday, opportunistic interaction among members of a workgroup, though it has not always been used for precisely this purpose. The particulars of the design are unimportant for the moment; the most important aspects of it are that it allows participants to have either synchronous or asynchronous conversations (and shift seamlessly between them), and that it provides a social proxy (a lightweight graphical awareness mechanism) that provides visual cues about the presence and activities of the participants. (Interested parties should see Erickson, et al., 1999 for a description of the system; Bradner, et al, 1999 for a report of its use and adoption (or not) by various groups; and Erickson and Kellogg, 2000, for the 'big picture.')