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Extending the concept of awareness to include static and dynamic person information

One of the goals of my work is to build Web spaces that promote collaborative activities among people who meet in online environments. In this endeavor, conventional concepts of awareness that stress presence and activity information are critical to informing the design of environments to support interactions among strangers. Knowing that people are around and what they are doing helps set the stage for social interaction. However, the task confronting strangers is to identify the "right" people to interact with. By this I mean, the ones who have the skills, knowledge, interests and motivation to provide value to the other party. Systems that are informed by current concepts of awareness do not help an individual address the selection question.In this position paper, I argue that the current concepts of awareness need to be extended to provide descriptive information about people to support the selection task. The descriptive information is of two types: dynamic and static. Static information is a priori collected characterizations of a person. Such descriptions might include a person's skills, interests, goals and any other data that would enable others to judge whether an interaction with a specific purpose might be of interest. Dynamic data is emergent. It is based on observation of a person's activities and is the by-product of such activity. Participants can use data from these two sources to select people with whom to interact and to guide their interactions.I am applying these notions to a system called ePlace with which I have been working for the past year. ePlace is a 2-D visualization environment that provides visitors to a Web site with awareness of other visitors to that site. It does this through the use of an abstract graphical representation of people and activities [for a detailed description see 8].