sharing

In this paper, we describe the YeTi information sharing system that has been designed to foster community building through informal digital content sharing. The YeTi system is a general information parsing, hosting and distribution infrastructure, with interfaces designed for individual and public content reading. In this paper we describe the YeTi public display interface, with a particular focus on tools we have designed to provide lightweight awareness of others' interactions with posted content. Our tools augment content with metadata that reflect people's reading of content - captured video clips of who's reading and interacting with content, tools to allow people to leave explicit freehand annotations about content, and a visualization of the content access history to show when content is interacted with. Results from an initial evaluation are presented and discussed.

In this paper we propose a novel way of supporting occasional meetings that take place in unfamiliar public places, which promotes lightweight, visible and fluid collaboration. Our central idea is that the sharing and exchange of information occurs across public surfaces that users can easily access and interact with. To this end, we designed and implemented Dynamo, a communal multi-user interactive surface. The surface supports the cooperative sharing and exchange of a wide range of media that can be brought to the surface by users that are remote from their familiar organizational settings.

Collaboration often relies on all group members having a shared view of a single-user application. A common situation is a single active presenter sharing a live view of her workstation screen with a passive audience, using simple hardware-based video signal projection onto a large screen or simple bitmap-based sharing protocols. This offers simplicity and some advantages over more sophisticated software-based replication solutions, but everyone has the exact same view of the application. This conflicts with the presenter's need to keep some information and interaction details private. It also fails to recognize the needs of the passive audience, who may struggle to follow the presentation because of verbosity, display clutter or insufficient familiarity with the application.Views that cater to the different roles of the presenter and the audience can be provided by custom solutions, but these tend to be bound to a particular application. In this paper we describe a general technique and implementation details of a prototype system that allows standardized role-specific views of existing single-user applications and permits additional customization that is application-specific with no change to the application source code. Role-based policies control manipulation and display of shared windows and image buffers produced by the application, providing semi-automated privacy protection and relaxed verbosity to meet both presenter and audience needs.