Dhruba talked about his work on promoting social awareness.
Three systems have been presented, that follow the same approach - providing holistic visualization of activity going on in a small group (2 to 20 people).
The contributions of single users are represented based along with the novelty of a contribution.
The systems are:
1. Vlaag: supports a small group concentrating on a certain task such as planning the event or discussing a small topic. The system is used as an discussion aggregator. Instead of mailing her/his contribution to everyone in a group a user posts it to Vlaag. S/he can also see there the other users' posts, see who has been active and react on the most recent contributions.
2. Peercev.com provides visualization for twitter.com. The system retrieves twits that the user is following and creates a map, where s/he can observe who and when has been added new information.
3. my.like.groups is a similar client for citulike.com. The system creates two kinds of visualization:
- user centric, showing the recent activity of the communities that the user is part of, and
- community centric, showing the contributions of all users in a community.
Several ways of developing the systems have been suggested:
- so far systems do not model/take into account tags, which could help a user to do
meaningful information filtering- the created maps are not clickable. By clicking on a user, the system could open its communities, by clicking a community a system could unfold all its users, etc. Supporting
navigation over a social network seems like a nice idea.
