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Project: CHIplace (demo).

Concept: An open-access, online interaction environment developed for the ACM CHI 2002 conference:

• to facilitate interactions among people both in time and space.
• to enable CHI participants to comment and influence planned activities for CHI 2002

Features:

• Social browsing to enable people to get to know each other,
• Special areas for history of CHI, HCI techniques, HCI organizations, etc.,
• Discussions, CHI trivia, quick polls, CHI 2002 paper preview,
• Bridging physical and online worlds with CHIblogs, Plasma Light

Design: The site was based on the design principles and collaborative framework that I have been formulating about social interaction environments.

Implementation: This was a completely new venue for ACM CHI conference. We developed the focus, selected the name (CHIplace), obtained domain registration, set up the server at FXPal, and built the site. The site was built on a Web-based infrastructure consisting of social, computational, and content and data management tiers using Macromedia JRun and free software (i.e., Red Hat Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL database, and Jive discussion forum). Specific Web technologies used include HTML, cascading style sheets, Javascript, Java, servlets, JSPs and JDBC.

Deployment: The site was deployed as www.chiplace.org from April 2001 — May 2002. An archive of this version of the site is available at chiplace.fxpal.com.

Status: Site now archived at chiplace.fxpal.com. Subsequent versions of the site, are managed by Kristina Hook and Martin Svensson (CHI 2003) and Loren Terveen and GroupLens Research group (current), has a different look and feel and a different focus. However, the underlying infrastructure and components were based on our architectural design).

Population: 1200 registered international users and numerous anonymous users.

Principals: Done in collaboration with Andreas Girgensohn (FXPal). Jointly involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation aspects.

Publication: Girgensohn and Lee, ACM CSCW 2002.

Work Conducted: January 2001 — May 2002.