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Network Communities Overview
Projects
When members of a team are remote from each other, as more and more are, real-time awareness systems, like Awarenex, can help determine if a person you want to reach is available right now. But what if they're away? Will they be back soon? Are they out to lunch? Should you send an email, and if you do, when will they see it? The modern workforce faces these and similar questions in coordinating work and communication among remote team members. The Rhythm Awareness research explores making predictions about future availability from the history of a person's activity and presence information to help distributed team members contact each other.
Developed in conjuction with the Speech Integration group, Awarenex is a a research prototype that helps both workstation and mobile users stay in closer contact with members of their workgroup. Not only does Awarenex include graphical clients that run on handheld devices, PCs, and workstations, but it also includes a speech interface to awareness information for those who may only have access to a telephone. A number of the communication and awareness features in Awarenex are an outgrowth of an earlier project code-named ConNexus. The Awarenex project was featured on the cover of Sun.com March 27, 2001 - April 3, 2001: Awarenex: Sun Labs prototype cuts across multiple messaging platforms for remote workers.
In ConNexus, the team integrated instant messaging (IM) functionality with other communication resources (e.g., e-mail, calendar). ConNexus takes the features of IM, which became popular for on-line socializing, and incorporates them in a design tailored to the needs of enterprise users in the workplace. Prior to that, the group's first project involved a three-month investigation of how members of a distributed work group collaborate and share institutional memory. In this project, we studied the North American Customer Care centers (CCCs) which is distributed in three locations (Massachusetts, Colorado, and California). Our report identifies how people's geographic separation, organizational boundaries, level of trust, and motivation to work together shape their collaborative activities:
It also suggests implications that these factors have for the design of new technologies to support remote collaboration. A prototype multi-user terminal application called SharedShell resulted from the ethnographic study of the CCCs.
A study group, including the Network Communities team members, was formed in 1999 to develop a vision for application portal computing in the future. This is the report that emerged from that study group.
The SharedShell technology has been transferred out of the Labs to Enterprise Services for productization.
Further Information
For more information, contact Nicole Yankelovich.
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