Projects Babble Loops World Jam Research Design explorations Knowledge Communities

Loops

Our goal is to design systems that support communication among small to medium-sized groups that is deep, coherent and productive. Our working assumption is that it is possible to support coherent behavior by making participants and their activities visible to one another; this allows people to draw on their social knowledge (e.g, if there's a crowd, it must be interesting).

To explore these ideas we have developed Loops, a web-based "persistent chat" system.Loops allows members of a distributed workgroup or task force to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously, with participants being able to see who is (or was) present and what has happened recently. Loops (and its predecessor, Babble) makes use of social proxies, minimalist graphical visualizations of the presence and activities of people participating in a Loop. The figure below shows a social proxy of a knowledge community, with the large circles representing topics areas(one of which is expanded into conversations-the clusters of small circles), and the small dots showing where people are. The proxy also provides ways of viewing the history of activity, areas where new content has appeared, and so on.

For more information about the rationale behind Loops, see the description of the Babble project, its predecessor.

Publications regarding Loops are on the Social Computing Group publications page.