Supporting Community in Third Places with Situated Social Software

Joseph F. McCarthy, Shelly D. Farnham, Yogi Patel, Sameer Ahuja, William R. Hazlewood, Daniel Norman and Josh Lind
4th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2009), 25-27 June 2009, State College, PA
[Paper (PDF)] [Slides (@SlideShare)]

Abstract

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 coffee house patrons and staff on a large computer display in the coffee house, 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.