Adding cultural signposts in adaptive community-based virtual environments

This paper describes an experimental, adaptive community-based system, the Forum, designed to facilitate communication where there are mutual concerns or interests among virtual communities within or across organizations. Our description of the Forum is presented from the perspective of user-centered interaction design. The system consists of a WWW-based collaborative virtual environment comprised of intelligent software agents that support explicit information sharing, chance meetings, and real time informal communication. The Forum provided the technological support for users to interact informally, but lacked the social support necessary to motivate users to interact with strangers in their community of practice. Context, or the reasons why two persons might want to meet, was overlooked. We propose future directions for the Forum including cultural signposts that provide contextual cues in the intelligent community-based system to better support information sharing and real time communication between strangers. The contribution of the present paper is to provide lessons learned about design considerations from a series of user trials over a period of one year for developing adaptive community-based systems.