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Project: Portkey.

Concept: A password-protected online environment developed to support summer interns in their transition to and their work assignment at IBM TJ Watson Research Center by enabling them to exchange helpful information and experiences and to develop social networks.

Features:

• Official information on housing, area, laboratory, procedure, etc. organized around tasks and needs,
• Social browsing tools — profiles with organizational info (e.g., mentor, "ask-me") and additional directories (by first name),
• Peertalk — enable annotation of official info with experiential or idiosyncratic information from other students (e.g., tips) using asynchronous discussion,
• Peertalk — develop personal, professional and social networks before and during time at Watson using asynchronous discussion.

Design: Enable strangers to vet and to identify others with related interests based on self-descriptions, contributions and public activities. The key social component included in Portkey was social browsing tools in the form of various people profiles and directories and asynchronous discussions. The site offered a second opportunity to apply design principles and collaborative framework that I have been formulating about social interaction environments.

Implementation: The roots of the Web-based infrastructure underlying Portkey shared many of the same social, computational, and content and data management components as CHIplace which I helped conceptualize and build. I extended the infrastructure to support the needs of the Portkey project by adding additional functionality (e.g., large collection of social browsing directories and discussions). Portkey used Macromedia JRun, Red Hat Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL database, and Jive discussion forum. Subsequently, I moved from MySQL to IBM's DB2 database. The specific Web technologies used include HTML, cascading style sheets, Javascript, Java, servlets, JSPs and JDBC.

Deployment: The site was deployed and operated from May — September 2001.

Status: An excerpt (with no input functionality) was created for Summer 2002 interns from June — September 2002.

Population: Available to 340 summer interns and 298 managers and mentors.

Principals: Done in collaboration with Catalina Danis (IBM Research), Jun Zhang (U of Michigan), Unmil Karadkar (Texas A&M) and Human Resources.

Publication: Girgensohn and Lee, ACM CSCW 2002 and Danis, Lee, and Karadkar (in review).

Work conducted: January 2001 — April 2002.