Intelligence and interaction in community-based systems
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 humanยฑcomputer 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 deยฎned 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.
Community-based interactive systems (Stathis and Purcell, 2001) may arguably be amongst the most topical, and technically interesting areas of development in information and communication technology today. They are certainly the most socially signiยฎcant. Such systems act as the new connective tissue of a modern genre of digitally linked communities. These communities can vary enormously in scale, both in character and organisational goals, which can vary from grass roots political activism to enhancing communication between the citizen and the local municipality. The idea is not as odd as it sounds, that citizens may use such advanced communication infrastructure to connect with and share experiences with their next-door neighbours, or indeed between members of the same family. Rather a major focus of current development is on the role of devices/ appliances (Norman, 1999) (whether portable, mobile, or ยฎxed), which incorporate the appropriate software capabilities to support local residents in performing their social activities and putatively enhance community spiritรthe neighbourhood esprit de corps!