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Tech Report kmi-04-25 Abstract


From Buddyspace to CitiTag: Large-scale Symbolic Presence for Community Building and Spontaneous Play
Techreport ID: kmi-04-25
Date: 2004
Author(s): Yanna Vogiazou, Marc Eisenstadt, Martin Dzbor and Jiri Komzak
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In this paper we discuss the conceptual framework and principles that guide our work in the design of large-scale informal environments for collaborative work, learning and play, aiming to foster social bonds and to provide an exciting testbed for emergent social behaviours. We present three different applications we have developed: Buddyspace, an Instant Messaging environment for community building, BumperCars, an online presence-based multiplayer game and CitiTag, an experimental wireless mixed reality game.

Publication(s):

Accepted for: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Santa Fe, New Mexico, March 13 -17, 2005
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.