Opportunistic interfaces for promoting community awareness

Community awareness is the general knowledge about community members, the state of the community, as well as the norms and roles in the community. In an academic research setting, maintaining an adequate level of community awareness helps build and sustain social networks, eases information sharing, and facilitates the collaboration in creative work. This general awareness often lacks concrete details, rarely affects people's immediate activities, and is poorly supported by current technologies that often presume established goals and existing contexts of interpersonal interactions. Opportunistic interfaces, on the other hand, convey information by chance, often unobtrusively in the periphery of attention, and help people take advantage of such opportunities. This thesis explores opportunistic interfaces as an alternative technique in fostering community awareness.; Specifically, we assessed awareness issues in a real-world academic research community and experimented with popular ways of enhancing awareness and interpersonal interaction. Based on our findings, we devised a set of objectives of community awareness applications and iteratively developed two opportunistic interfaces that demonstrated the trade-offs between small, corner-of-the-desktop interfaces and large, full-screen displays. Finally, our evaluation of these example applications helped formulate recommendations for integrating opportunistic interfaces to promote community awareness and communication.