CALL FOR PARTICIPATION The Role of Place in Shaping Virtual Community A Workshop at the ACM's 2002 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work November 16, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA Submission: Position paper and profile by Friday Sept 20th Organizers: Quentin Jones, New Jersey Institute of Technology, qgjones@acm.org Christine Halverson, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, krys@us.ibm.com ABSTRACT The adoption of modern communication technologies increasingly situates interpersonal interactions virtually. This has had an enormous impact on people’s social networks as community ties shift from linking people together-in-physical-places to people-to-people-wherever-they-might-be [18]. However, these changes have not lessened the importance of place, be it virtual or physical, in shaping interaction patterns and discourse. The term place means different things to different people, and this workshop will examine these differences in relation to virtual community. In particular this workshop aims to explore the myriad of ways that: 1) the design of virtual or hybrid spaces / places directly provides common ground for user interactions; and 2) communities use public interactions in virtual spaces to create shared meaning. This exploration will in turn be used to enable an examination of various aspects of virtual community development and maintenance. THEME In recent years we have moved away from the notion that the ever increasing virtualization of interpersonal communications has simply led, as Meyrowitz’s [12] describes it, to a sense of placeless-ness. Instead, it is now widely accepted among computer-mediated communication researchers that cyberspace abounds with virtual places within which vibrant interactions occur [7]. Instead of focusing on the demise of many of the physical Great Good Places [13] where unrelated people relate, many have celebrated the growth in virtual places associated with community [15]. These places where virtual community members interact are referred to by a wide variety of labels including chat rooms [14], cyber-inns [4], virtual settlements [9], commons [11], and conferences [8]. The provision of such labels highlights the role of virtual places in providing context for discourse. Of course, the context of place both affects, and is affected by associated user interactions and the nature and form of the client technologies used by members to interact. Some systems are completely open to the public, such as LambdaMoo [16], others are restricted to a membership [17], or a specific task or purpose [5]. All these points highlight the importance of gaining an understanding of the role of place in shaping virtual community discourse. This task is made even more pressing by the advent of mobile client technologies that use devices such as PDA’s or cell phones, and associated communication technologies such as SMS and 3G, which complicates notions of virtual community public places. This workshop aims to explore the role of place in supporting virtual community interactions. Among the questions we hope participants will take on are the following: · Is place designed? Accreted? Or renewed through interactions on some regular basis? · Is place a physical metaphor? Or expressed through issues of behavior, understanding of presence, or discourse? · How does place provide a context for your virtual community? · When community members interact with their client technology how does place impact on their interactions? · What is the interaction between the design of user interfaces and the ability of the participants to create a place for social interaction? · What theoretical constructs have been useful to you in understanding how interactions in community places have enabled people to stays tied together? A variety of disciplines are pertinent to these explorations, including architecture, sociology, linguistic and discourse analyses, and design. Each one approaches the ideas of place and common ground for interaction from a slightly different perspective, and level of detail. Other disciplines may have pertinent insights and approaches. We would like to encourage them all. Important perspectives and issues include the notions of space and place [7], common information space [1], common ground in discourse [3], discourse architecture [10], genre theory [6], and other detailed aspects of linguistics [2]. REFERENCES 1. Bannon, L., and Bodker, S. Constructing Common Information Space. Proceedings of the Fifth ECSCW. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands , 1997. 2. Brennan, S.E. and J.O. Ohaeri. Why do electronic conversations seem less polite: the costs and benefits of hedging. in WACC '99. 1999. San Francisco, CA : ACM.. 3. Clark , H. Arenas of language use. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992. 4. Coate, J., 1992. Innkeeping in Cyberspace, In: Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (DIAC-92), Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Palo Alto, CA. http://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/0/Community/innkeeping. 5. Erickson, T., et al. Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of Babble. in Human Factors in Computing: The Proceedings of CHI 99. 1999. Pittsburgh, PA : ACM Press. 6. Erickson, T. Making Sense of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC): Conversations as Genres, CMC Systems as Genre Ecologies. In the Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science. January, 2000. IEEE Press. 7. Harrison, S. and P. Dourish, 1996. Re-place-ing space: The roles of place and space in collaborative systems, In: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, ACM, Cambridge, MA pp. 67-76. 8. Hiltz, S.R. and M. Turoff, 1981. The evolution of user behavior in a computerized conferencing system, Communications of the ACM, 24 (11 November): 739-751. 9. Jones Q. 1997. Virtual-communities, virtual-settlements & cyber-archaeology: A theoretical outline. J of Comp Mediated Communication 3(3). 10. Jones Q., and S. Rafaeli 2000. Time to Split, Virtually: ‘Discourse Architecture’ and ‘Community Building’ as means to Creating Vibrant Virtual Publics. Electronic Markets: The International Journal of Electronic Commerce and Business Media. 10(4) 214-223. 11. Kollock, P. and M. Smith, 1994. Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities. In: Computer-Mediated Communication, (Ed. S. Herring), John Benjamins, Amsterdam. 12. Meyrowitz, J., 1985. No sense of place, Oxford University Press Inc., New York. 13. Oldenburg, R., 1989. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through The Day., Paragon House, New York. 14. Reid, E. M., 1991. Electropolis: Communications and community on Internet Relay Chat, Honors, History, University of Melbourne. http://www.ee.mu.oz.au/papers/emr/work.html. 15. Rheingold, H., 1993. The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. 16. Schiano, D.J. and S. White. The first noble truth of CyberSpace: People are People (even when they MOO). in CHI 98. 1998. Los Angeles CA : ACM. 17. Schlager, M. and P. Schank. TAPPED IN: A New On-line Teacher Community Concept for the Next Generation of Internet Technology. in CSCL '97, The Second International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning. 1997. Toronto : ACM. 18. Wellman, B., "Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Personalized Networking" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, 2 (2001): 227-52. There have been a number of past community workshops, covering formation of communities, construction of infrastructures and understanding aspects of group formation and vitality. Recently there has been more emphasis on how to study and understand active communities. We would like to expand this to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved as they relate to place. ACTIVITIES AND GOALS The full day workshop will be divided into three sections: 1) Exploration of participants’ examples of how the design of virtual place provides common ground for user interactions; 2) An examination of how communities use public interactions in virtual spaces to create shared meaning; and 3) A synthesis session where participants will explore various aspects of virtual community development and maintenance. If attendance is high we may break into subgroups for more intense discussion. If this is the case then each smaller group will report back with their key ideas. By the end of the workshop participants will have a catalog of examples of existing virtual places and an accompanying critique of their strengths and weaknesses for supporting user interactions SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS By Friday Sept 20th, submit the following to qgjones@acm.org Proposals should be no longer than 6 pages and should include description of the following aspects. 1) An existing place used to support community (or communities); 2) An examination of how the place/s under consideration provides common ground for user interactions; and 3) Theoretical ideas or approaches that help you understand context and social interaction, or an exploration of virtual community development and maintenance. Position papers should explain how the author’s work relates to the workshop theme. We are particularly interested in seeing perspectives at a variety of levels from high and meta to micro- scales. Position papers will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and the final organization will be adapted to take into account the number expected and the range of submissions. We expect about 12-15 participants, but could expand up to 20. If size approaches the maximum we will adjust the workshop organization to spend some time broken into small groups so that the quality of the discussions remains high. We look for a wide range of participants. System architects and designers who have thought about and implemented supports for social interaction, social psychologists, linguists and sociologists who have studied online interactions, and others we may not have previously considered. Those from outside of the CSCW community should note that you are NOT required to pay the conference registration fee if you only want to attend the workshop. However, first-time attendees are most welcome, and we encourage you to look over the array of offerings on the conference program. FOR MORE INFORMATION - On the workshop: contact the organizers qgjones@acm.org, krys@us.ibm.com - On CSCW 2002: http://www.acm.org/CSCW2002/ - For an expanded web-based version of this CFP: http://modiin.njit.edu/cscw2002place/