Community Organizer: supporting the formation of network communities through spatial representation

Author

Kamei, Koji ; Jettmar, Eva ; Fujita, Kunihiko ; Yoshida, Sen ; Kuwabara, Kazuhiro

Author_Institution

Sci. Labs., NTT Commun., Japan

fYear

2001

fDate

2001

Firstpage

207

Lastpage

214

Abstract

We introduce Community Organizer, a system designed to support network communities by providing spatial representations of community members and communication exchanged among these members. This spatial representation reflects the closeness of interests and concerns among them. We conducted an experiment with two different versions of the software. One version offered meaningful spatial representation while the other version did not. Experiment results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed spatial representation. The subjects who used the software providing the spatial representations felt a greater sense of “community”, enjoyed using the software more, and actively used it longer than subjects in the control condition

Keywords

Internet; information resources; personal computing; Community Organizer; Internet; community members; experiment; network communities; spatial representation; Computer networks; Electronic mail; Laboratories; Marine vehicles; Software design; Software testing; User interfaces; Visualization;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Applications and the Internet, 2001. Proceedings. 2001 Symposium on

Conference_Location

San Diego, CA

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0942-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SAINT.2001.905184

Filename

905184