Intelligence and interaction in community-based systems
Kostas Stathis, Patrick Purcell · Interacting with Computers · 2002
In a world of virtual and real communities, this special issue of ‘Interacting with Computers’ focuses on the real. The issue addresses the communication needs of physical co-located communities, those lay people who may live next-door, frequent the local pub, send their children to the same school, or bump into each other intermittently at meetings of local societies or professional associations. This is then the world of informal and spontaneous interactions located in a set of concentric patterns of personal, familial, social and civic circles. The context represents a major challenge for the profession of human–computer interaction to construct information technologies that support the interactions of ordinary people in these social settings. With pervasive internetworking, computers have become an extremely effective and economic means by which people communicate. A new generation of applications further challenges computer software to serve as the intermediary between people, to both facilitate and sustain their social relationships. Indeed, a group of such applications under the umbrella of social computing (Schuler, 1994), focuses on the relationships between people when workplace tasks are defined via software in organisations, when people learn and teach with computers, when governments devise and implement policies over networks and when people interact socially in the context of modern community lifestyles.