Social Meeting System

Japanese version is here

Overview

We have developed a social meeting system called CommunityBoard that supports discussion on network. This system displays the discussion structure which consists of three aspects: the speakers, topics, and time. It enables us to grasp the context of discussions.

Solving Difficulties of Discussion on Network

Discussion on network, e.g., by a mailing list, is becoming more and more popular. It is convenient in that we can discuss at any places at any time. However, many people have difficulty following and participating in discussions on network because of information overload. This shows that the previous systems fail to provide enough supports for grasping the context of discussions. In order to solve this problem, we have developed CommunityBoard.

Visualizing the Structure of Discussions

Figure 1 shows a screen image of CommunityBoard. For grasping the context of discussions, it is necessary to be able to easily access information about the speakers, time, topics, and combination of them. In CommunityBoard, an icon represents a message. Icon's face images, colors of icons, and locations of icons represent the speakers, time, and topics respectively.

Screen image of CommunityBoard
Figure 1: Screen image of CommunityBoard

Joining the Discussion Smoothly

CommunityBoard provides us various information, which leads to the productive discussions. The following will be attained.
  1. Users can predict what kind of responses, e.g., favorable, unkind, useful, worthless, the users will likely receive by looking at who the other participants are.
  2. Users can begin to speak about a topic in a way suitable for the place, since they can easily determine when topics have been recently discussed.
  3. Misdirected opinions and questions decrease, since users can easily determine what topics have already been discussed and what have not yet been discussed.
We hope to evaluate CommunityBoard by performing social experiments.

  1. Matsubara, S., Ohguro, T., and Hattori, F.: A Talk Support System in a Virtual Community (in Japanese) , Proc. of 6th Multi-Agent and Cooperative Computing Workshop (MACC'97), (1997).
  2. Matsubara, S., Ohguro, T., and Hattori, F.: CommunityBoard: Social Meeting System able to Visualize the Structure of Discussions, Proc. of the 2nd International Conference on Knowledge-based Intelligent Electronic Systems (KES'98), pp.423--428 (1998).
Contact: Shigeo Matsubara; Email: matsubara@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp

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Last modified on Thu Oct 15 11:48:00 JST 1998