The authors of this paper discuss designing a working system “Babble” as a way to support communication and collaboration amongst large groups of people. The socially translucent systems that are developed have three defining themes – visibility, awareness, and accountability. The authors understand that human behavior is critical for designing a digital system for collaboration. In order to for socially translucent systems to exist and be effective, they must offer full transparency in how they allow their users to “see”.
I found this paper very interesting and offered a lot of great insight into modern support communication tools today. I found surprising how the author only chose three themes to assess designing support communication tools. Two major themes that came to mind that I wish I saw in the paper was the concept of change and customization. With change – applications are constantly improving as technology gets more efficient. Also, to see how the measured the usability of the application compared to similar applications would have added novelty into further understanding human behavior. Understanding this concept of how the system could change and be adaptive overtime would been very interesting to analyze. Apart from that, I was impressed with how well the paper laid out these concepts. We see many of them being used in applications today.
“—Conversation Visualization and Restructuring: The knowledge embedded in conversations should be reusable. That is, we want to move from Today’s state, where conversation is of value primarily as it occurs, to a situation in which the comments that make up a conversation can serve as a useful work product. It should be possible for members of a knowledge community to search, navigate, and visualize their conversations. Similarly, participants should be able to add structure to conversations: summarizing, highlighting, linking, and otherwise annotating them. “
I found this to be the most interesting section of the paper because i immediately thought about google docs and how each core concept described in this section is very similar to the foundation of Google Docs.