social

Help-seeking communities have been playing an increasingly critical role in the way people seek and share information. However, traditional help-seeking mechanisms of these online communities have some limitations. In this paper, we describe an expertise-finding mechanism that attempts to alleviate the limitations caused by not knowing users' expertise levels. As a result of using social network data from the online community, this mechanism can automatically infer expertise level. This allows, for example, a question list to be personalized to the user's expertise level as well as to keyword similarity. We believe this expertise location mechanism will facilitate the development of next generation help-seeking communities.

Employee directories play a valuable role in helping people find others to collaborate with, solve a problem, or provide needed expertise. Serving this role successfully requires accurate and up-to-date user profiles, yet few users take the time to maintain them. In this paper, we present a system that enables users to tag other users with key words that are displayed on their profiles. We discuss how people-tagging is a form of social bookmarking that enables people to organize their contacts into groups, annotate them with terms supporting future recall, and search for people by topic area. In addition, we show that people-tagging has a valuable side benefit: it enables the community to collectively maintain each others' interest and expertise profiles. Our user studies suggest that people tag other people as a form of contact management and that the tags they have been given are accurate descriptions of their interests and expertise. Moreover, none of the people interviewed reported offensive or inappropriate tags. Based on our results, we believe that peopletagging will become an important tool for relationship management in an organization.

In this paper, we describe Augur, a groupware calendar system to support personal calendaring practices, informal workplace communication, and the socio-technical evolution of the calendar system within a workgroup. Successful design and deployment of groupware calendar systems have been shown to depend on several converging, interacting perspectives. We describe calendar-based work practices as viewed from these perspectives, and present the Augur system in support of them. Augur allows users to retain the flexibility of personal calendars by anticipating and compensating for inaccurate calendar entries and idiosyncratic event names. We employ predictive user models of event attendance, intelligent processing of calendar text, and discovery of shared events to drive novel calendar visualizations that facilitate interpersonal communication. In addition, we visualize calendar access to support privacy management and long-term evolution of the calendar system.