John C. Thomas
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
There exist many facilities for dealing with well-structured information once it
has been input into a computer. However, much of the knowledge creation and exchange
that takes place in a community of practice is in the form of semi-structured stories.
Stories are memorable and motivating and
are used in industry in a variety of ways; e.g., scenarios for design, reference
stories for sales, "war stories" to communicate things that work and don't
work, and educational stories for training purposes. I am currently engaged in a
project to understand how stories are and might
be used by IBM Knowledge Management consultants. We expect to build a useful story
base for these users and to develop an integrated set of tools to help in the creation
and capture of stories, their organization, their search, and their utilization.
In some sense, stories provide specific solutions to complex, ill-defined problems
where there are multiple conflicting goals. It may be possible to combine the implicit
wisdom of stories into a pattern language for solving such problems.
Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design
of "Babble"
Wendy A. Kellogg
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
We take as our premise that it is possible and desirable to design systems that support
social processes. We describe Loops, a project which takes this approach to supporting
computer-mediated communication (CMC) through structural and interactive properties
such as persistence and a minimalist graphical representation of users and their
activities that we call a
social proxy. We discuss a prototype called "Babble" that has been used
by our group for over a year, and has been deployed to six other groups at the Watson
labs. We describe usage experiences, lessons learned, and next steps.