Supporting community in third places with situated social software
Joseph F. McCarthy, Shelly D. Farnham, Yogi Patel, Sameer Ahuja, Daniel Norman, William R. Hazlewood, Josh Lind · 2009
The Community Collage (CoCollage) is designed to cultivate community in a café, a quintessential "third place", by bringing the richness of online social software into a physical community space. The system shows photos and quotes uploaded to a web site by café patrons and staff on a large computer display in the café, providing a new channel for awareness, interactions and relationships among people there. We describe the CoCollage system and report on insights and experiences resulting from a 2-month deployment of the system, focusing on the impact the system has had on the sense of community within the café.