Design and deployment of community systems ... - Semantic Scholar

Interacting with Computers 14 (2002) 689–712 www.elsevier.com/locate/intcom

Design and deployment of community systems: reflections on the Campiello experience A. Agostinia,*, G. De Michelisa, M. Divitinib, M.A. Grassoc, D. Snowdonc a

DISCO—University of Milano Bicocca, Cooperation Technologies Laboratory, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, 8, Milano 20126, Italy b IDI—Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway c XRCE—Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France

Abstract The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in what technology can do to sustain communities. Within the Campiello project innovative information technologies have been adopted to support the dynamic exchange of experiences among people living in cities with high levels of tourism, in this way reducing the progressive diminishing of identity suffered by the local communities of these cities. The system developed has been used, for an experimental period, in a neighborhood of Venice, Italy. In the paper, we reflect on the whole Campiello experience, considering all its development phases. These reflections are organized as a set of issues that require attention, respectively, in the design and deployment of community systems, illustrated with examples from Campiello. We believe that due to the relative novelty of community systems, this type of reflection is important to inform the design of future systems such that they better fulfill their objectives and become an integral part of community practices. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Community-based systems; Community memory; Innovative interfaces; Large screens

1. Introduction A community can be described according to the definition given by Basselar and Beckers, (1998) as: “an association between people, which is not coordinated by money (the market) or by power (formal organizations), but through communication based on shared norms and interests”. With the opportunities offered by information and * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ 39-2-6448-7826; fax: þ39-2-6448-7839. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Agostini). 0953-5438/02/$ - see front matter q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 5 3 - 5 4 3 8 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 1 6 - 4

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A. Agostini et al. / Interacting with Computers 14 (2002) 689–712

communication technology (ICT), in recent decades we have seen an increasing worldwide interest in what technology can do to sustain and support this type of community. These efforts can be divided in two basic areas: one more interested in trying out real experiences and in understanding all concrete deployment issues of such systems; another focused more on enhancing specific aspects of the technology through in-depth research on some isolated features. In the literature, usually the former systems are called community networks (or more recently digital cities) (Ishida and Isbister, 2000; Schuler, 1996) and the latter communityware (Ishida, 1997). Community networks have been conceptualized as a means of rebuilding the community, and several examples of them have been deployed worldwide (Ishida and Isbister, 2000). For example, the ‘Rete Civica di Milano’ (RCM for short) is described by Casapulla et al., (1995): Launched in September 1994, RCM aims to introduce each component of its community—citizens, associations, institutions, businesses—to a free-of-charge, effective, user-friendly electronic environment where everybody can personally try out the potentialities of: † electronic mail, both within the system and on the Internet; † conferences (electronic forums, discussion groups); † chatting (interactive ‘talk’ among users in real-time;). The objective is that the technological means become the support to advance social goals such as building community awareness, encouraging involvement in local decisionmaking, or developing economic opportunities in disadvantaged communities. To address these aims, by necessity community networks have a concrete agenda of real deployment. The technology used is in most cases state of the art in comparison to existing commercial tools, and—as in the case of RCM—sometimes the technology itself is improved by researchers working closely with the community network. On the other hand, there have been several research efforts addressing single aspects of community support. Ishida (Ishida, 1998) has recently proposed a taxonomy for classifying the technology efforts of communityware: † Knowing each other; technologies aimed at facilitating communication, in both virtual and physical worlds, fall in this category. † Sharing preference and knowledge; in this category come technologies meant to enhance the process of filtering, sharing and making available the knowledge that community members possess and support the awareness of what the current activities are. † Generating consensus; in this case the focus is on helping the process of reaching a consensus in groups of large size, like the social communities addressed here. † Participation in social events; in this category come technologies supporting the common fruition of large social events like exhibitions and cultural tours.


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† Supporting every day life; in this category fall the basic technologies required by a community network, such as email, chatting and newsgroups. In this paper, we will present the results of Campiello (Agostini et al., 2000a), a project bordering between community networks and communityware technology research. From this experience we derive some lessons to be applied to what we hereafter call community systems: systems that are both technologically innovative and able to support real deployment and usage. The paper is therefore not meant to be a detailed description of the Campiello system (Agostini et al., 2000a), nor of the methodology adopted for its design (Agostini et al., 2000c), nor an evaluation of its experimental usage (Agostini et al., 2000b, 2001). Rather, it is a reflection on the whole experience, considering all its different phases, from the design, which deeply involved various local subjects, up to the evaluation of its usage. This reflection is presented in form of a list of issues that require attention, respectively, in the design and in the deployment of community systems. Before proceeding with the description of the system it is important to delimit the boundaries of the Campiello experience. Since the beginning the project aimed at empowering existing local communities, i.e. communities sharing a place, rather than at creating virtual ones. The usage of the Campiello system has actually proved that there is a real need for this type of system: systems that amplify the voices of the groups that live within a city giving them an audience and helping them to get together to create a vibrant local community. The decision to support local communities has a strong impact on the design of the system. In fact, social life is situated in spaces where it fully involves its participants, engaging their sensorial as well as their intellectual and emotional experience. Therefore, it is important that community systems are broadly accessible in the spaces occupied by the community. These systems must not create a virtual place for their users, but augment the spaces where communities live, connecting or integrating them through virtual spaces, as well as decorating them with the collective memory of those communities, in order to provide their services to any member of the community. Though our observations may apply to other types of communities, such as the ones characterized by sharing an interest (community of interest) or a practice (community of practices), we primarily focus on local communities, and only to a lesser degree on the communities of interests and practices that grow within them. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section we introduce the Campiello system, briefly describing the context within which it was developed, some technical aspects, plus its experimental usage in Venice. Section 3 presents a set of lessons that require attention during the design of a community system, focusing in particular on the need to provide the community with a memory that grows with the community. Section 4 provides some lessons on the deployment of community systems so that they get rooted in the community, becoming an integrated part of the community’s practices.

2. Campiello Campiello (Agostini et al., 2000a) is a system supporting the exchange of information among communities living in culture rich cities, and between these communities and

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foreign visitors. The aim is to build a network for empowering existing communities as well as one that tries to bring different communities together. Campiello works on two levels: opening the boundaries of the community and reinforcing the sense on membership. First Campiello supports local communities to reinforce their identity on the assumption that only healthy and alive communities are ready to share their knowledge and experiences to newcomers, in the case of art cities to tourists. At this point Campiello provides support to turn local inhabitants and tourists alike into active participants in the creation of knowledge, enhancing the bi-directional exchange of information about the city, its places and events. In this paper we focus on the reinforcement of local communities, since this allows us to draw lessons that are valid not only for art cities, but for local communities in general. Two cities were chosen as contexts for the project: Venice in Italy and Chania in Crete (Greece). Both cities nurture a cultural heritage linked to their territory, while sharing it with people of different cultures from all over the world. In this paper, we focus on the experience done in Venice. In Venice, the lost of identity and weakening of local communities is more dramatic than elsewhere. Therefore, this city represents a good case to understand the characteristics of the problem, since it is more visible than in other cities. However, Venice is not a case of its own. The same type of problems holds true, to different extents, to most of the local communities worldwide. 2.1. The context Venice is a city of art known worldwide for being built on water, having no streets and cars but canals and boats. In Venice, the weakening of local communities has been startling. Throughout the 20th century and especially since the 1950s, modernization of the local economy and, accordingly, changing lifestyles and culture have had a major impact. Moreover, due to a complex set of causes, the town started suffering a constant, sometimes amazingly fast drop in population, from 150,000 inhabitants in 1951 to the current 70,000. Venice attracts some 15 million visitors per year, most of whom stay in town for a just few hours. Nowadays tourism is the major industry in the urban economy, as well as one of its main problems in terms of impact on the town’s physical social and economic structure. Culture in Venice has become mainly a product to sell to tourists while authentic popular traditions have been lost. In spite of everything, however, there are still signs of resistance against the city’s mainstream commercialization. Our approach has been to select one of the few areas in Venice where a local community is still alive and can be usefully supported in its resistance against fragmentation and cultural standardization. We chose the sestiere of Castello, one of Venice’s six neighborhoods, as the context for our experiments in the city. In fact, unlike most areas in town, it is still quite a lively and populated district. Resident migration has been lower than elsewhere in Venice and a number of services devoted to residents and not to tourists, have survived. Tourist flows hardly touch this neighborhood due to its marginal position in relation to major city attractions and tourist terminals. Nevertheless, the neighborhood contains various sites of historical and artistic interest. We can mention the Arsenale complex (the biggest naval


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yard of ancient times) and the church of S. Pietro di Castello. The lack of mass tourism and the high number of residents has helped the survival of some traditional handicraft workshops and arts and crafts associations. Among the various neighborhood events, a feast day celebration very well attended by local people is held annually in a wonderful “campo1.” Moreover, in Castello we can find various subjects (associations, committees, schools) playing a role in enlivening and re-interpreting the community’s culture. We selected one crucial subject within the neighborhood—local school P.F. Calvi—working with it because of its active role in the community life and find occasions to observe its dynamics (as much as possible) from the inside. 2.2. The system In the Campiello system (Agostini et al., 2000a), information is proposed to users according to their profile and preferences, the history of their interactions with the system, and their physical location. Information is filtered and recommended by agents attempting to transform this large quantity of information into a qualitative selection of shared knowledge. In addition, the system stimulates the reaction of users in the form of annotation: comments, ratings and further contributions can be attached to the ‘core’ piece of information. The architecture of the system can be split into four levels. At the bottom there are two interlinked repositories for the knowledge: a relational database and a web server. Above the repositories there are the core services constituting Campiello: mainly, the information filters (search and recommender (Glance et al., 1998; Grasso et al., 1999)) and the map server for localizing each piece of information on a map. These services can communicate so as to be used together. Above the core services there are the display managers applying the algorithms specific to a class of interfaces, and then the interfaces themselves, which are presented later in this section. The Campiello system has been developed with the primary requirement of being able to support the whole community, not just members who have the possibility to use a computer with Internet access. For this reason, although there is a web interface, we chose to give priority to interfaces that could be seen and used by everyone, namely paper and large screen displays. These interfaces have been selected in light of their potential to support ubiquitous access to information and in assuring a high degree of accessibility and usability by the whole community. Other interfaces (e.g. mobile phones and palmtops) could be integrated in Campiello to enrich its capability to be used on any occasion by any person. Below we describe the main characteristics of the three existing user interfaces. The PC interface is a standard web-based interface to the knowledge base. The webbased interface has the advantage of providing remote access to users physically distant from the territory occupied by the local community. However, this interface requires one to be computer literate; therefore it is still not usable by all members of the community. On the other hand, it is still the most efficient way to enter, modify and organize digital information. The paper interface takes a medium everyone is familiar with (i.e. paper and its 1

Campo and Campiello are the names used for denoting the squares in Venice (except Piazza San Marco).

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Fig. 1. An example of the paper user interface (NewsCard).


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Fig. 2. The appearance of the CommunityWall interface in Venice.

artefacts such as flyers and magazines) and adds the possibility for the user to use it as a means of interacting with the system. Each page contains a Xerox Dataglyph (Johnson et al., 1993) (conceptually a sort of high-density barcode although the actual encoding technique is different) which enables the system to recognize the page when it is scanned or faxed and process it according to user input. In Campiello, pages including a DataGlyph are called NewsCards (Fig. 1). NewsCards can present information to the user but also allow them to interact with the system by selecting checkboxes, writing or drawing in input areas or selecting areas on a map. Once the user has finished with a NewsCard she can scan it at the nearest Campiello access point, fax it to the central server or even post it by normal mail. The advantage of paper is that people can carry it with them and fill it in when they have time, or as they view the event (or monument, festival, etc.) that the page describes. In this way the paper user interface supports a slow-paced interaction very different from the one normally associated with computer interfaces. We could consider it a more ‘thoughtful’ interface since users do not need to give a response while in front of a possibly heavily used computer but can take the page with them and complete it in a number of hours, days or weeks according to their needs. Obviously, interacting via paper is slow compared to a normal computer user interface (because of the time taken to scan a page and print a response); however, paper allows access without requiring users any technical skill. Therefore, NewsCards make the system potentially accessible by all members of the

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community. In addition, simplicity of use and easy distribution should stimulate people to be more active, for example in commenting and voting on the content. The third interface is the large screen display, which we call the CommunityWall (or CWall for short). The goal of this display is to present information about what is currently of interest to the community in a public setting. The CWall can be thought of as a large electronic notice board that automatically updates itself. The display deliberately avoids the look and feel of the standard desktop interface (Fig. 2); moreover, the display is touchsensitive so that people can interface with their fingers.2 The interface presents summaries of the items that it currently deems of interest to the local community at a given moment (customizable rules are used to drive this process) and allows some simple interaction to take place. Users are able to print a complete item, so they can read the full text at their leisure, indicate their opinion of the item (on a scale from ‘hated it’ to ‘very interesting’) and leave written comments by writing on the screen with their finger. The system automatically recognizes what they write and transforms it into text using software from SMART Technologies (SMART Technologies Inc., on-line). We also constructed a version of the CWall for office use, which is capable of sending items to people as email or receiving new items for display by email. The CWall is intended to provide an overview of the ‘most interesting’ information; most importantly, it is designed for triggering conversations among its viewers. Though a wide distribution of CWall is difficult due to the high cost of hardware, even a limited number of installations can have a strong impact on the community in terms of system visibility. In particular, if the CWall is deployed in locations in which social interaction naturally takes place, then it is easier for the system to become a part of community life. 2.3. The experiment In order to evaluate the achievement of Campiello project objectives and to evaluate the effectiveness of the Campiello system, an intensive period of experimentation was set up in Venice (Agostini et al., 2000b). The experiment was planned and organized so as to obtain information concerning a broad range of evaluation criteria. For instance, the period—extending from late May 2000 to early July 2000—was selected to encompass various types of events in the local community. This allowed for the evaluation of the system in connection to special local events (e.g. the annual feast day celebration of the patron saint, the end of the school year) as well as to its day-to-day use. During this period both qualitative and quantitative data were collected. We must point out, however, that even if observations were carried on only during this month, the actual use of the system has been much longer (measured in terms of months). Within the Campiello project a new user-centered approach to design has been used (see Agostini et al., 2000c for greater detail). This means that various subjects of the Venetian local community participated actively in the project with the twofold role of influencing the design of the system and producing the content of the Campiello knowledge base. In particular, the already cited local school P.F. Calvi, one bilingual local 2

Due to cost factors, in Venice we have not used touch screens but keyboards and mice.


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magazine (Leo), one bilingual local newspaper (VeneziaNews) and, lastly, one Museum (Historical Naval Museum) filled in the majority of the content of the Campiello system. The system remained accessible throughout experimentation period at the following address: http://www.campiello.org. During the experiment, three Campiello areas were set up: one at the Historical Naval Museum; one at Maria Ausiliatrice; and one, from the 29th of June to the 2nd of July (that is during the annual local feast day celebration of San Pietro, patron saint), in the bell tower of the San Pietro church. All sites allowed access via PCs (two for each site), large screens (one for each site), and paper interface (approximately 15 different NewsCards on various topics). The spots were selected in order to reach different types of potential users. In fact, having observed in the previous years that there are not many places shared by tourists and locals, we chose the locations so as to reach both types of users as far as possible. The area at the Naval Museum had been chosen mainly for tourists, the other two mainly for locals, one for everyday conditions and the other in connection with a community event. All three sites are found within the previously cited sestiere of Castello. In order to have a greater availability of the paper user interface in the city, during experimentation a special issue of the Leo magazine—complete with a Campiello NewsCard—was distributed (Leo has a circulation of circa 15,000 copies). This page, which pulled out of the magazine (pre-cut on one edge), was inserted near two articles concerning Campiello and providing further information on how to use it. We did a targeted distribution in previously selected hotels in order to have complimentary copies of Leo in each hotel room during the experimentation period. In those selected hotels faxes were available for clients wanting to process the Campiello NewsCards.

3. Lessons on the design of community systems The experience of Campiello indicates two key issues on which designers of community systems should focus: community memory and the interaction modes. As discussed in the following sections, the former dimension is essential for providing a community with a system that meets its basic need to support the body of knowledge belonging to, existing within, and growing with the community. The latter is essential for providing a community with a system that its members can use in their everyday life independently of their availability of a PC. The Sections 3.1 and 3.2 describe in further detail what we mean by community memory and interaction modes, together with some issues along these two dimensions that require attention in the design of community systems. As mentioned in Section 1, these lessons derive from a reflection on the entire Campiello experience—to which we refer to support our claims. In particular, the lessons we report are not based merely on the evaluation of the actual use of the system during the experimentation periods. Quite the contrary, they come from an analysis of the project’s full lifetime—from participatory design of the system, to relationships with the local subjects, up through collaborative production of Campiello knowledge, and so on.

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3.1. Fertilization of community memories Community memories can be described as the body of knowledge about the local community and relative neighborhood that individuals record and share with others. Memories are a key asset of communities since they are at the basis of the learning process that keeps the community alive. However, in local communities community memory is endangered by the decline of social interactions. The social experiences where memories are traditionally created through oral communication (family interactions, community social activities) are weakening for various reasons. For example, many people are commuting daily between neighborhood and workplace; families are becoming ever smaller; mass media divert the interests of community members. Surviving cells of social action (schools, cultural associations, social aggregations of different kinds) are unable to involve the whole community in their knowledge creation processes; they are therefore unable to create lasting and widely shared community memories. ICT can play a key role in supporting community memory by promoting alternatives to the disappearing social processes at the basis of its survival. When designing a community system we must therefore put emphasis on community memory, considering that the system must not be conceived as a depot for storing knowledge, but as a locus supporting a continuous process of knowledge creation and sharing. The potential of technology in supporting community memories struck us in the early phase of the Campiello project when we studied the work practices of the P.F. Calvi School. A full description of this experience is reported by Agostini et al. (1998). Here we simply provide a summary and further discussion of it in light of the subsequent experimental usage of the Campiello system. The schoolwork is organized in projects aimed at rediscovering the cultural heritage of the Castello community. For each project, the school seeks out in the neighborhood specific partners (parents, elderly people, cultural associations, local institutions, etc.) and occasions for spreading their findings. Here are two simple examples: the collection of information about the P.F. Calvi School’s history took place not only by consulting school archives but also by interviewing elderly people; a project about age-old Venetian crafts resulted in a public theatre production. The school projects enhance communication between generations, deepen bonds with the environment, and reinforce awareness of the immediate habitat (past and present). However, this research is presented on few occasions to a limited audience (mostly student families) through means poorly integrated and difficult to update and access (handwritten posters, recordings, video-recordings, etc.). The school does an invaluable job in rediscovering community memory, a memory that is often not available in any explicit form but is ‘hidden’ in the minds of community members and along neighborhood streets. Unfortunately, this work remains or the most part only accessible to the people directly involved in the projects and does not contribute to the creation of a permanent and vital community memory. The process of preserving memory as supported by the school is articulated around the two major activities of collection of knowledge and its representation. In this way, the memories represented have a short life and spark no continuous growth, because community members have limited possibilities to access and enrich them after their


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Fig. 3. The process around preserving community memories.

representation. The process around memories should instead encompass four steps: collection, representation, dissemination, and enrichment (Fig. 3). It is only when all of these four steps take place that all community members have the chance to participate in the memories, make them their own again, promoting a learning process that involves the whole community. In the following, we discuss how community systems can support these steps. 3.1.1. Facilitating content collection The P.F. Calvi School projects have shown us that the community knowledge and memory are distributed among multiple and heterogeneous sources. Knowledge lies in the archives, in the people, in the streets. Therefore a community system must facilitate the acquisition of knowledge from distributed sources. This is, however, not only a traditional matter of information retrieval from heterogeneous sources as normally intended in the context of ICT. It is first and foremost a question of helping people, e.g. to communicate effectively with the entire community, to keep track of what they collect, to elaborate the content, to create links and discuss with others where similarities and joint representation can be made. Existing collaborative document management systems like BSCW (Bentley et al., 1997; BSCW, on-line) and DocuShare (DocuShare, on-line) can play a role in this phase. In fact, they offer common workspaces where the gathered information can be stored (in any format), shared and collaboratively elaborated, even by people at different times and in different locations. In the Campiello project, the collection phase was not supported directly by the system and took place mostly off-line. However, we understood that such a support is essential, especially when everybody in the community should be involved in the creation of its memory. Some additional observations are in order. During use of the system, we noticed that the memory per se became a source of material to elaborate. The co-existence of material created by different communities allows us to get different perspectives on a single topic. For example, a P.F. Calvi School teacher looked at various articles in the VeneziaNews magazine dealing with topics of interest for students in order to get ideas and collect material for future work. The support for this crossfertilization is a relevant achievement of Campiello. In fact, as in the above case, often this cross-fertilization would have not taken place without Campiello, even if the materials were already available through other communication media. On the basis of our observations, we believe that what makes the difference is the feeling that Campiello provides a common ground. This is an important point for all

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community systems. Moreover we have observed that whenever accessible from public points, the system itself can become a center of socialization fostering the exchange and collection of fragments of community memory. We want to underline that a great part of the collected material is in paper format, e.g. previous student project reports, books, filed documents. Providing a smooth shift of paper-based material into electronic format represents an important support a community system can provide to help everyone in the community to take an active role in memory development and enhancement. Thanks to the paper interface, this could be done easily— for example, by providing a specialized type of NewsCard that allows for the identification and classification of an item in the classification scheme of the system, and then the insertion of scanned images and texts constituting the item’s content. 3.1.2. Enhancing information representation Once material is collected, it must be represented in a suitable way. Defining what is ‘suitable’ depends on the kind of information as well as on its intended use. To make a simple example: a song can be represented by its lyrics, by its score (set down on paper) and, finally, in CD or tape form (recordings). All three representations are important since they suit people with different goals. In its work, the P.F. Calvi School adopts a wide range of presentation formats. Mostly, projects are summarized in poster form (paper). However, the children also represent their work through theater performances, as they did for a project on disappearing Venetian crafts; or in the form of artifacts, as in the case of a project on winemaking that produced some wine. Sometimes, of a huge school research project all that is left is a video with a little superficial information about the knowledge collected. In general, every time a medium is chosen confusing its availability with its suitability, pieces of relevant knowledge are definitively lost. The ideal case is when, for a particular piece of information, a full range of interlinked representations are available; in fact, when we have only one we could easily miss some relevant aspects. Hypermedia archives—and the broad range of related applications handling them and specifically converting the formats—seem a suitable solution for the enhancement of information representation. In Campiello, the possibility of recording text, photos, drawings, video and audio recordings has been widely used, resulting generally in material interesting to read and surf. Also importantly, the use of hypertext resulted in a more flexible representation of the project’s results, with the chance to create links and correlations with other parts of the memory. However, it is necessary to accept that technology does not support some of the more unusual representation formats available in the real world. This implies that at least for local communities, the community system must be fully integrated in the life and in the territory of the community. 3.1.3. Supporting knowledge dissemination Community memories need continuous and diffuse knowledge dissemination within the community, so that all its members become aware of their shared patrimony, in this way strengthening their feeling of belonging to it. We use the term dissemination instead distribution, more common in the literature, in order to stress that in community systems knowledge must be seamlessly integrated into the everyday life of users, possibly


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populating the territory they share. This requires switching from the metaphor of delivery information to the one of disseminating it. In this section, we focus on services to support dissemination, but it is important to underline that dissemination requires also a complete rethinking of user interaction with the system, as discussed in Section 3.2. As previously discussed, in Campiello we have observed that dissemination can be very difficult to achieve. Within the P.F. Calvi School projects, dissemination of the results was confined to short periods of time involving a restricted number of people. Other members of the community could completely miss the chance of accessing this knowledge in that they did not even know about it. The same was true for many other associations or individuals collecting relevant pieces of collective memory, but missing a way to reach out the whole community. Our experience confirms that ICT can provide an invaluable support to dissemination of memory’s content, playing a passive as well as an active role (van Heijst et al., 1998). In the first case, the system provides access to the memory, but it is under its users’ responsibility to decide that they are interested in a piece of knowledge and look for it in the memory. In the latter, the system takes an active role in distributing a piece of knowledge to people that can be interested to it. In both cases, the Internet plays a key role since it provides a simple and inexpensive communication infrastructure, from bulletin board and mail systems up to more complex web-based systems. A community system can support knowledge dissemination even when it plays only a passive role. First of all, a web-based system increases the accessibility of the knowledge, making it available 24 h a day, independently by users’ location. This is a huge advantage with respect to existing paper archives. In the P.F. Calvi School, for example, all the material produced in the projects is collected in an archive whose access is almost impossible for students, due to bureaucratic reasons, and problematic for teachers. Second, even when archives can be actually accessed, people are still facing difficulties in finding what they are looking for. With electronic archives it is possible to do searches both by keywords or on the full text. In Campiello, searching facilities were not available for Italian, and this proved to be a dramatic limitation of the system, one that could be often overcome only thanks to the people attending the areas and acting as ‘search engines’. Due to the social nature of communities, search by author should be supported. Finally, in addition to searching, it is important to provide support for navigation, so to invite users to discover things that they are not aware of, and therefore they would never look for. This is critical for community systems since their users are often not motivated by needs that drive the search for specific information, but rather by generic interests in what is happening or has happened in the community. During the Campiello experiment knowledge was organized into six main contexts, with additional classification at the lower levels, and material could often be accessed by multiple contexts. According to our experience having the same piece of information available through different navigation patterns is important to increase its visibility. In addition to the hierarchic organization provided by the contexts, we want to stress the importance of providing additional navigation patterns by creating direct links between specific pieces of knowledge. On the overall, we believe that the organization of the memory content has to foster casual encounters of users with unexpected pieces of knowledge. In fact, given the nature of community systems, whose success often depends

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on its capability of ‘surprising’ its users, support to navigation along unexpected patterns is paramount. In addition to the passive support for retrieving information, a community system can take an active role in making sure that right people get the right knowledge at the right time. This is particularly important when the dimension of the memory grows and it becomes difficult to navigate it. In Campiello, we have adopted a community-based collaborative filtering system, which provides recommendation to individual users by filtering out the information that can be relevant for them. The recommendation algorithm works by relating the past interactions of the user with the system to the interactions of other users with similar interests (Glance et al., 1998). During the experiment in Venice, we have however, experienced that in open communities (i.e. not easily delimited for example by organizational boundaries like in work settings) it can be difficult to collect enough information on users’ preferences to activate recommendations. We believe that other rules should be integrated with the existing ones in order to reduce the start-up demands. For instance, our experience observing the items displayed on the CWall shows that the rules adopted for the selection of items in the CWall (the most read or commented articles, the newest one, the ones related to the place where the interaction is taking place) could be positively integrated in the recommendation system. In Campiello, the system was not fully active since it was under the responsibility of users to ask for recommendations. However, once a recommendation system is in place it is straightforward to develop notification services, for example by sending periodically through email recommendations to all registered users. 3.1.4. Allowing content enrichment To become a shared patrimony a community memory must be freely manipulated and ‘enriched’ by all the community members, in this way increasing their feeling of ownership. There are two categories of services that can be adopted by community systems to support the enrichment of community memories: annotation and ranking. Annotating tools let electronic information that is publicly available to grow with chained additional annotations and comments put in the proper context. An example of such a system is Commentor (Roscheisen et al., 1995). In Campiello, annotations can be added to any items in the form of comments. The comment is on the whole knowledge item, and users do not have the possibility to annotate specific parts of it in the current version of the system. This has however, not been perceived as a limitation during the experimentation period. In addition to generic comments, Campiello offers its users the possibility to give more detailed comments in the form of answers to questions associated to the items (Fig. 4). In fact, when inserting something in the memory its authors can decide to associate a question to it on aspects they want a feedback on. For example, when inserting information on a certain association its members can be interested in getting information on other similar associations; when providing information on a concert it can be interesting for the organizers to get comments on the chosen location. In this way the annotation become an additional communication channel between the producer of a specific piece of information and its consumers. In


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Fig. 4. An item associated to a specific author’s question (PC interface).

Campiello, comments are visualized together with the name and, when available, picture, of the person who left the comment. This proved to be a welcomed feature of the system, since it provides the community system with an appreciated resemblance to normal social life. Given the discussion in Section 3.1.3 about navigation of the memory contents, a community system should provide the possibility to annotate material with links to other materials, in order to create navigation patterns that make sense to the community. A word of warning is necessary, annotation systems are effective at allowing information to be augmented by several people, however, we can expect that such an increasing set of information can easily become too difficult to navigate and unhelpful in singling out the personally most relevant parts. Enrichment of content can also be achieved by allowing users to rank an item within a given range of values. We adopted a scale from 1 to 5 (poor to excellent). Whenever available the average evaluation is shown. As mentioned when talking about dissemination, an item can be related to many contexts. For example, the item describing the P.F. Calvi School building (a XVI century monastery) and its actual uses is related to both architectural and educational contexts. Therefore in Campiello each evaluation is done in relation to a specific context. This is important because the same piece of information can be differently evaluated in relation to different contexts. For instance, tourists can evaluate the P.F. Calvi School building as a marvelous monument, while parents of P.F. Calvi School’s students can criticize the rooms used as laboratories. In general, the possibility to enrich the content is appreciated both by knowledge producers and consumers. For the first, it is a way to get a feedback on their work, an indirect form of reward. For the latter, it is a way to play an active role in the definition of

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their community memory. In general, we have seen that commenting is preferred to ranking, probably because it gives users the opportunity to be more active. In some cases, commenting can promote the participation of a person in the community life from peripheral to socially active. 3.2. Rethinking the interaction modes As already pointed out, a careful analysis of community practices and processes helps to identify the community’s primary needs and thus determine the range of services to be included in a system that would support and stimulate its social activities in view of its own memory. However, to provide a system which the whole community can use in a natural way at any situation, we must in no uncertain terms focusing on the interaction between people and tools—and not only on the functions provided by the tools per se. In particular, we must couple the efficacy and effectiveness of services with universal accessibility and usability while taking into account the communities’ specificity and natural evolution. These issues are detailed in the following sections. 3.2.1. Ubiquitous access Social life is situated in physical spaces where it involves participants in full, engaging their sensorial as well as intellectual and emotional experiences. Therefore, community systems must be set up, be open to the community, directly in its own spaces. Rather than creating a virtual place for users, the system should augment community spaces decorating them with their collective memories. The community should be supported within the territory where its social life takes place, and a piece of information should be accessible where it makes sense (e.g. an item of history should be available in every spot relevant to it). Due to their great potential in this respect, Campiello adopted both paper and CommunityWall interfaces. Providing different interfaces let us cover a wider territory and a variety of locations. In particular, smooth integration with the territory helped to foster casual encounters with the community and to ensure user ‘loyalty’ to the system. Moreover, widespread use of places familiar to the community has ensured access by people—children and the elderly especially—who would have never accessed the Campiello website. Many people came in contact with the system while out strolling or doing the daily shopping. For some, this casual encounter had almost become a daily habit. We now discuss the principal results, in terms of ubiquitous access to knowledge, due to the adoption of the three Campiello interfaces. The cost of PCs and risk of vandalism make a broad distribution of dedicated PCs in public spaces difficult and limit the accessibility of the PC interface. Nevertheless, the PC proved more ubiquitous on the territory than expected. In fact, PCs already in use within the community—in our case mainly in schools and homes—became an access point at no additional cost. For example, people with computers made them available to others when specific tasks had to be performed, as in entering new content. In regard to the large screens, while wide CWall distribution is difficult due to the high cost of hardware, we found that even a limited number of installations (two) had a strong impact on the community in terms of system visibility. The CWall succeeded in sparking people’s interest in Campiello knowledge and fostered both interactions with the system


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and discussions about local issues. The paper interface, as expected, proved particularly suitable in ensuring a fine grain and easy distribution of knowledge on the territory at a relatively low cost. Moreover, we often exploited its just-in-time feature, i.e. producing and distributing it immediately upon need. In addition, thanks to careful design and distribution, NewsCards can enrich the territory in a sort of post-it mode, reminding people about community memory and the chance to access it. The NewsCard on Maria Ausiliatrice (Fig. 1) is illuminating in this regard: although distributed in different places around Castello, Maria Ausiliatrice was the spot where it proved most successful, i.e. where it was collected by the greatest number of people and where it triggered the highest number of interactions with the system. 3.2.2. Access for the whole community Since local communities are constituted by the common experiences of their members, any system supporting a community must support all its members in order to avoid the creation of smaller isolated communities within the community itself. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that a community system offers continuous support (unlimited access in whatever situation) to all persons regardless of gender, age, sociocultural/educational background and, specifically, technical prowess. In other words, the system must not create any barrier in regard to any individual and/or situation. Due to the range of potential situations, individual skills and preferences, it is difficult to develop a single interface that meets all needs. This requires a community system to adopt multiple interfaces. For instance, we can circumvent the technological barriers PCs pose for many people by providing simpler interfaces, e.g. paper-based ones. During our experimentation period in Venice, we observed people of various backgrounds—young to old—accessing the system. For different reasons, some totally rejected the idea of using a PC. It was therefore important for them to have different interfaces, at least in making the first interaction. Since a community’s makeup and needs may vary, extensibility is key in the design of any set of interfaces. However, eliminating the technical competence requirement is no simple matter. We claim that empowering everyday objects with computational capacity, as in the augmented reality approach, is a profitable path. Yet, the perceived and cultural affordance (Norman, 1993) of the resulting artifacts must be given careful consideration. In fact, even if we meant paper to be a ready interface for everyone, this assumption did not prove fully true. Theoretically, pen and paper are easy to use. After all, they represent a common tool in Western culture; a high percentage of people can mark a cross with a pen on a piece of paper. However, we discovered that people have a hard time grasping what to do with a form other than reading the information on it. People appreciated the NewsCards available, but did not use them to interact with the system to the extent we had expected. In general, we observed that people have problems in understanding (i.e. perceiving) the interactive nature of NewsCards. Some people asked about the differences between a NewsCard and a printed web page; they failed to spot any even after lengthy inspection of both. In general, comparing last year’s experience in Venice with this year’s, we think that the less information there is on a NewsCard the easier it is for users to understand its interactivity. Instead, most of the NewsCards distributed were taken as information sources worthwhile to collect per se. But they did not induce users to get more information.

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3.2.3. Personalized access exploiting community practices The need to support community learning and all knowledge transformation processes requires that community members be allowed to participate in community life not only peripherally (by looking at the knowledge provided by others) but also more thoroughly (by producing new content or enriching the existing one themselves). This is a key point if people are to make the system their own. It implies that a community system must support both active and passive access. In Campiello, CWall’s mainly passive nature proved to be a limitation impacting on its use. For example, some pupils of the P.F. Calvi School, seeing themselves as content providers, practically neglected the CWall entirely in that too passive. The PC showed the most suitable interface for an active fruition of the system providing richer and more flexible interaction possibilities, especially in regard to the collection of new material (both entering of new items and commenting on existing material). However, other tools, such as paper, have great potential. For instance, the entering of totally new items was not available in the current Campiello system even if, as already pointed out in Section 3.1.1, this service can be easily added. This possibility could result particularly useful whenever the material people wish to enter is available in paper format. In general, mobile or ubiquitous interfaces can compensate for the limited interaction modalities they offer through the possibility of reaching a broader range of people and allowing on-the-spot memory enrichment in the form of annotations, comments, ratings. Fostering learning also requires that the system become part of the various community practices, most of which are social in nature. This implies that a community system must support individual and group access. In Campiello, we noticed that socialization around the system leads naturally to group interaction. Even if an interface is not specifically designed for group access, we found that people build practices around interfaces to gain group fruition and creation of knowledge (Agostini et al., 2001). For example, in our system the CWall was the only interface specifically designed to support group fruition of knowledge and to foster socialization around the system. However, we observed two friends who registered as a single user in order to work together; groups of people who talked about a NewsCard and then decided together what to ask. Not to mention common cases—in our experience at least—of teenagers, families, couples, etc. browsing together via the PC interface. The degree and kind of participation in a specific community differ from person to person. Therefore, any community system should recognize the people’s roles and goals within the community. This means that the access to knowledge must be differentiated in relation not only to the user’s specific aim but to her characteristics as well. In particular, both the services provided and the filtering and visualization of knowledge must be differentiated in terms of the above specificity. In Campiello, we do this mainly through recommendations based on a commonality in rating articles on the same topic (Glance et al., 1998; Grasso et al., 1999). As anticipated in Section 3.1.3, however, our experience has shown that adopting this type of algorithm—an approach proved successful elsewhere—becomes problematic in reference to local communities. In fact, to open the community we must provide unregistered access to the system or at least to some of its services. This implies that some, usually the majority, of interactions come from non-identifiable users and so cannot be used for recommendations.


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While important, personalization algorithms must be carefully designed in accordance with user practice. We also believe other rules should be integrated with the existing ones, for instance, in light of other kinds of user action (e.g. comments, printing) or physical location. Moreover, taking into account people specificity within the diverse interfaces also means that the system as a whole should provide diverse presentation patterns, thus fit with the different ways people deal with knowledge. For example, while the paper interface is a medium where detailed information is coupled with simple interaction mechanisms, large interactive screens present a general overview of various items of knowledge with a variety of interaction possibilities.

4. Lessons on the deployment of community systems Many studies have shown the importance of the deployment process to ensure the successful usage of a system (Orlikowski, 1992). However, most of these analyses are done within organizational contexts. Though some of the lessons learned from organizations can apply to communities, the latter pose a new set of challenges. For example, within an organization the importance of proper training to ensure a smooth adoption of a system is often pointed out. In general, training an entire community is out of the question, so the system must rely on users willingness to ‘learn by mistake.’ Moreover, there is no authority to enforce the usage of community systems, and the social practices that lead to its acceptance by the whole community are extremely complex. Our experience in Campiello has shown that adopting multiple interfaces ensuring system accessibility to all community members, everywhere, is a necessary albeit insufficient step. Ensuring system acceptance and usage is a long and costly process requiring continual fostering: the system must be rooted in the community and grow with it. 4.1. Introducing the system to the community A system’s successful introduction into a community depends significantly on the collaboration of promoters with deep roots in the community itself. Promoters are responsible for advertising the system and stimulating other people to play an active role (by registering, sending messages, commenting, etc.). During our experiment in Venice we observed that some members of the community became promoters spontaneously after having familiarized themselves with the system. Although their support is valuable, it is not enough. Promoters must be actively sought out, even long before the system is actually in place. The Campiello team formed this kind of alliance with the P.F. Calvi School. The teachers of this school consider their school an active party in neighborhood life; thus their educational goals range beyond the pupils to include the immediate surroundings as well. Conscious and proud of their role, they are open to every endeavor that can contribute to fulfilling their objective. In relating with the school, we have sought to be as unobtrusive as possible, trying not to modify their style of working (with the exception of consolidation of computer use). The implicit contract ‘signed’ between the Campiello project and the P.F.

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Calvi School involved on the one hand the possibility of entering the local community free of the label ‘foreigners’ and thus gaining a closer, keener look at it; and on the other the opportunity for awarding the work done in and for the community a greater degree of diffusion and overall effectiveness. There is also a ‘down’ side to the role of promoter: people may reject the system not because of the system itself but because they have a negative attitude toward the promoter. In particular, we noticed that some locals were unwilling to look at the system due to disaffection towards the town government and to general skepticism about everybody having a voice. However, on the basis of our observations we feel this problem could become less relevant if the people were to use the system for a longer period of time and so come to realize it is something belonging to them rather than to an outside entity. 4.2. Training As mentioned before, providing all community members with traditional training is basically impossible. This drawback puts major demands on the design of the system (which must be robust enough to survive usage by inexperienced users) and its interfaces (which must be as intuitive as possible). However, our experience has shown much can be done to promote a smooth adoption of the system and the understanding of its services. In particular, in Venice we observed that the lack of formal training could be partly compensated for by making the system accessible in contexts where there are people on hand to introduce the system and help users to overcome initial skepticism or fear. In general, this is especially important in places/situations accessed by individuals unfamiliar with technology, e.g. at old folks homes and during feast day celebrations. Moreover, in Venice the community came up with its own system-oriented practices for fostering the peripheral participation of new users until able to acquire the knowledge necessary for acting alone and maybe becoming ‘trainers’ themselves. For instance, at the Campiello stands we often saw that after having registered and grasped the basics of Campiello, kids kept coming back with friends or relatives, proudly helping them to do the things they had just learned. Therefore, on the one hand a community system should be designed so as to foster these practices (generally based on group access to community memory); on the other, the places where the system is made accessible should allow and possibly stimulate the creation of these practices. 4.3. Populating the system with warm content A system supporting communities is more than a system providing information to its users. This means that content creation should not be a task assigned to professional users of the system, possibly from outside the community. Quite the contrary, it must be a broad activity involving, in different ways, all members of the community. In fact, variety of content creators ensures richness and diversity of system knowledge. For instance, in Campiello, for many events we can find ‘cold’ official information provided by some institutional source alongside ‘warm’ informal knowledge created by users such as students, citizens, visitors. Moreover, considering content creation on par with content consumption allows us to


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separate system management from content creation: every content creator is therefore free to enter new local content in the system on the basis of her aims but at no extra cost. We think this approach is most suitable for giving systems supporting communities the opportunity to survive. As a consequence of the above approach, the system must be designed so that content creation is as easy as possible, i.e. so that any person can do it without specific training and with minimum effort. For example, in Campiello, while for Venetian Municipality employees the PC interface seems most adequate due to its flexibility and efficiency, for locals and tourists in many cases paper is preferable. 4.4. Populating the territory During the experiment in Venice, we observed that a wide distribution on the territory is not sufficient for ensuring system usage. For example, we saw a big difference in interaction depending on the physical setting of the system. Distribution of the system throughout the territory must be carefully planned because it plays a key role in determining the success of the system within the community. Distribution must take into account factors such as the location of the stands in town, the organization of space within stands, the additional use of the site where the stand is set up. For example, during experimentation the approach to the system changed quite dramatically during the St Peter’s Day celebration. The occasion allowed for a very easygoing interaction on the part of both locals and visitors. It proved particularly appealing to the former who—feeling at home—were happy to find out what their children (or other people they knew) had done to contribute to the system. When people simply strolled around the feast day area they seemed to be in the right situation for looking around and ‘wasting time’ on something with no readily apparent purpose. Instead, in the area at the Naval Museum we observed that the lack of time often emerged as a major concern. People visiting the museum not only had typically scheduled their time carefully in advance but also were very focused in their expectations. They looked mainly for information about the museum; they would have probably checked out the system if it had been the museum web site but they were not always willing to shift their focus. 4.5. Rewarding and amusing The actual adoption of a community system by a local community can be compared to a certain extent to all those cases in which it is necessary to gain large community involvement and participation (e.g. political elections). Therefore, in these terms, a system’s success depends on whether or not its users feel it is rewarding to use it. For instance, for systems used in a work context this means users perceive the system as useful in the completion of their tasks. In community systems usefulness is not the only criteria to take into account. More than usefulness, it is necessary to consider the associated ‘rewarding’ factors, both implicit and explicit. Rewarding mechanisms need to be integrated into the process of content production and usage. Sometimes these mechanisms are purely social and ‘independent’ of the system, e.g. for authors it may be rewarding to know people access their work. This

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has been the case for the majority of the authors of the Campiello content. In general, however, the more the system gets into community usage, the less an explicit reward is needed. This has been the main approach adopted in Campiello. In addition, we want to point out some playful aspects of the system that proved to be extremely important for increasing usage and attracting users. Among these, we can mention the possibility of finding the picture of a friend or some interesting content produced by a relative or the possibility for a user registering to the system to take her picture on-site, which was amusing for many people of any age. We observed that this simple function based on a cheap web-cam stimulated the registration and successive reiterate use of the system of many persons. These features should not be underestimated because in a system like Campiello it is user satisfaction that makes the difference between success and failure. 4.6. Adapting the system As a final issue related to the deployment of a community system, let us remark that communities are complex and dynamic. This implies that the system needs to be adapted to the particular community where it is in use, evolving with it. The collection of information about the actual use of the system (using direct observations, interviews, and automatic recording of logs) is essential for the continuous evaluation, and consequent adaptation, of the system. For instance, usage data automatically recorded by a system allow identifying the information that is accessed most, as well as obsolete information. This is important to understand users’ needs and preferences and to provide the information that they are looking for. In Campiello, the data collected allowed the identification of guidelines to make information more visible. For instance, rarely accessed items have been made accessible, when pertinent, through their inclusion in more contexts. In a similar way, the services need to be continuously tuned taking into account their actual use in the different situations. We have previously discussed that the success of a system also depends on where the system is made available to the public. Having data on how the system is used in different installations can help in organizing them so to assure the system is used at its best.

5. Conclusions The intuition behind the Campiello project is that the quality of a local community depends on its ability to keep its memories alive through social interaction within the community itself. What is needed is a system able to support both creation and maintenance of community memory through social interaction and making them available to its members and visitors. Campiello takes steps in this direction: it does not separate content creation from content consumption; it is accessible through different interfaces offering different interaction modes; and, finally, it is accessible both from the local territory of the community and remotely using the Web. As reported in previous sections, Campiello has been successfully experimented as a system that can enrich a local community. But our experience has also offered us hints


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about critical problems that systems supporting communities must solve to become an integral part of a community’s life. Let us recall two of them. First, the design of interactions with the system (from both content creation and enhancement as well as content sharing viewpoints) plays a crucial role in system usability and usage. In Campiello, we experimented, getting both positive and negative evaluations, some interaction modes and some resulting interfaces, but we still do not have either an exhaustive set of interfaces or complete guidelines for designing suitable interaction patterns for community systems. Research and experimentation on this issue must continue to consolidate some convincing results. Secondly, deployment of community systems in real situations is typically a sociotechnical problem. Technology is important and necessary but its successful adoption entails devoting keen attention (Ciborra, 1996) to (all) users and relative practices, the difficulties they encounter using the system, the ways in which they reinvent it, the learning they do while using it. This requires action at the promotion and communication level, but also careful selection of the location where the system is installed and adequate rewarding mechanisms for active users. But, getting back to the system per se, this also requires that the system be designed in such a way that the community can recognize it as its own. Scalability, flexibility and tailorability in terms of management policies and user profiling are features playing a highly relevant role in the system’s success.

Acknowledgments A special thank is due to the whole P.F. Calvi School, Valeria Giannella, Enrico Sambo, Alain Karsenty, and Michael Koch. The authors thank Alan Munro for his precious work during the experiment. The Campiello results are due to the efforts of all partners, so our thanks go to them all. In particular: to Joseph Forakis, Alessandro Rancati and Marco Susani of the Domus Academy Research Center (Milano, Italy) who designed the interaction modes; and to George Anestis, Stavros Christodoulakis and Fotis Kazasis of the MUSIC Laboratory, Technical University of Crete (Chania, Greece) who developed the knowledge base and the PC interface.

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