Facilitating Opportunistic Communication by Tracking the Documents People Use

Many of our conversations are not planned. Instead, they arise opportunistically as we become aware of the common interests and goals of others. We believe communication tools can be built that leverage knowledge of a user’s goals and activities to make users aware of others relevant to them and their work, with the aim of facilitating this kind of opportunistic interaction. We describe a prototype system, I2I, that helps people establish communication while they are manipulating related documents by embedding awareness and communication facilities directly into everyday document manipulation applications. I2I automatically clusters the documents users are manipulating based on their content, grouping related documents into a single conceptual space. It then makes the common work contexts of users visible by displaying only those users who are manipulating related documents. I2I also allows users to initiate conversations asynchronously through a facility we call calling cards. In these ways, I2I provides users with opportunities to communicate within the context of the activities they are performing in their primary application, without requiring they manually orchestrate the communication themselves. Once users become aware of each other, they can use the system to communicate using a variety of interactive modalities.