Intelligent Interfaces for Local Communities

We have recently co-edited a special issue of "Interacting with Computers" (to appear this month) that addresses the communication needs of physically 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 then is 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 human–computer 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 focuses on the relationships between people when workplace tasks are defined 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 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 significant. 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 – 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 (whether portable, mobile, or fixed), which incorporate the appropriate software capabilities to support local residents in performing their social activities and putatively enhance community spirit - the neighbourhood esprit de corps.

The availability of different devices with which people interact leads to a number of important questions concerning their various functions, levels of efficiency and the complexity of associated information models. Stated succinctly, there is a growing need to endow the user interface with the requisite level of "intelligence" which both masks the complexity of a given information model and concomitantly, promotes facility of use. Although the task of building such intelligent interaction devices requires a substantial amount of technical investment, the methodological stance being adopted in this special issue of "Interacting with Computers” is that technology is not an end in itself, but instead is a way of serving and mediating between people in their various roles as members of a local neighbourhood.

Subject matter in this special issue touches upon those broad topics which indicate real promise to empower the online citizen, or promote social cohesion in the community or, in general, will point to the potential of advanced work in information and communication technologies to benefit society. The invited papers identify this potential from the perspectives of, sociology, human factors, computation and management, amongst others. Although varied in their approach and methodology, they are all related by their common goal of understanding and building community-based systems, in which there is an emphasis on interaction design, or intelligence modelling, or both.

To conclude, the goal has been to present a selection of current work with the aim of designing and specifying intelligence and interaction in community-based systems. The work presented includes studies that discuss how to use existing communication infrastructures to support new forms of human-computer interaction by lay users whose interaction with other people is augmented by a wide range of networked devices. Devices in the network enable intelligent interactions through the use of software agents that manage the interaction of individuals or the community as a whole. The results presented indicate that community-based systems is an emergent and growing domain of application, facilitating interaction and communication amongst laypeople, irrespective of age, gender or technical competence.

Kostas Stathis and Patrick Purcell

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