Know Who You Know

Last summer, a researcher asked the head of a small San Francisco media company - let's call him Gary - a simple question: "Who are all the people in your office space, and why are they here?"

Easy question, right? Not even close. On any given day, there were 12 full-time employees, two new freelancers, two long-term freelancers and one client at Gary's firm, which designs Web pages and graphical interfaces for computer games.

The client came in at the start of a project - and stayed. He used one of Gary's conference rooms to hold meetings for his other projects so he could avoid a commute - and his boss, Gary says with a laugh.

Others on Gary's staff telecommuted, using e-mail to keep in touch. One animator just used the telephone and surfaced only to drop off drawings. Others were juggling various things at once: One coordinator was taking over information systems, and a freelancer valued for her ink and paint talents was helping with project coordination.

If this sounds maddening for everyone to track, you're right. If tracking everyone seems necessary, you're also right, because these days, your social network is crucial to finding new employees, helping you keep your job or finding a new one.

With that in mind, two researchers at Florham Park, N.J.-based AT&T Corp. Labs - design anthropologist Bonnie Nardi, who works in Menlo Park, Calif., and interaction designer Steve Whittaker, who works in Florham Park - are designing software to help individuals tame their social networks.

Dubbed "ContactMap," the planned software will be part alternative computer desktop, giving users access to various types of communications, and part information index, for reconstructing previous conversations, e-mails and swapped information.

If successful, the software will dramatically reduce the effort it takes to track and maintain contact with a social network. The current prototype is written in Java and runs on Windows. The creators are hoping for a full prototype by December, and if AT&T moves forward with it, the software could be released as early as next year.

Welcome to the New Economy, where skills are useful, but maintaining a good network might be the most important skill of all.

Networks don't end within a company's walls: Many times, individuals band together in so-called communities of practice - collections of individuals doing similar jobs in different organizations who can help educate one another, find one another jobs and serve as impromptu support groups. These communities aren't confined to the workplace.

At least, that's what the anthropologists found when they studied 22 people in 12 different organizations during the past two years. "People said they spent a lot of time maintaining their social networks," says Nardi. In today's workplace, "with the threat of reorganizations, layoffs and business failures, people are thrown back on their own resources" to succeed, she says.

But technology was making that increasingly difficult, researchers found. Each new way of communicating seemed to add another layer of complexity - should you use instant messaging or someone's mobile phone number? At the same time, people were driven by "the need to keep up" with the latest technology, says Heinrich Schwarz, an MIT graduate student who helped conduct the research.

Human-centric Thinking

The research turned up other interesting facts: Even after years of using graphical interfaces on Windows and Macintosh computers, users still don't think about their information in terms of files and folders, notes Whittaker.

"If you talk to the average user about how they do all their work, they talk about things in much more personal terms: ‘So-and-so sent me a document; I need to get back to this other person; I need to get copies to this other person.' There's this very human-centric way of thinking about information," says Whittaker.

So the researchers decided that ContactMap's principal indexing mechanism wouldn't be a list of e-mails or surnames but rather groups of faces.

The idea was also partly driven by biology.

"A huge proportion of our brains is given over to the recognition of faces. There's research that shows that infants a few hours old recognize the face as a distinct object. This is something that's quite primitive, but there are no computational systems that are organized around the principle of people," says Whittaker, a child psychologist by training.

Why don't more contact management programs use pictures of people? Whittaker says that until recently, image file sizes and processor power made it difficult.

"The key phrase is that ContactMap is people-centric," says Nardi. "Throw away the folders and bring in the people."

Face to Face

The current prototype of the ContactMap desktop has two frames.

The larger frame shows a number of faces broken into different clusters or groups such as work, family or PTA.

Each group has a different color background. If there isn't a picture of a person, a graphic "node" such as a cartoon image of a person's face can be substituted.

By scrolling a smaller frame on the side, a user can view specific information for each contact, such as addresses, telephone numbers and titles. That frame has a search capability as well as a list of all the groups the user has created. Clicking on one of the groups brings up the faces of the members of that group in the main frame.

To e-mail, instant message, videoconference or phone a contact, the user clicks on that person's face and then chooses the medium through which he wants to be connected.

Another view yet to be developed will summarize the user's interaction with a person, giving a list of e-mails, documents swapped and date and times when he previously used ContactMap to call someone or when he received calls.

Technology Hurdles

This assumes, of course, a level of computer telephony and software integration higher than what is generally available. That's only one of the significant technology hurdles to overcome.

To make it easy for users to start using ContactMap, Nardi and Whittaker say they want the program to import information from existing e-mail and contact management programs and suggest which groups people should belong to. But that feature is yet to come.

ContactMap must also work transparently with a variety of operating systems and software such as e-mail. Unfortunately, many vendors don't make it easy to interoperate with their software, even though application program interfaces are theoretically supposed to do that.

The program must also interface with computer telephony and videoconferencing. "Anything that involves communication and computing is extraordinarily complex," Whittaker says.

Without proper planning, new technology - such as ContactMap - can also have detrimental effects on its users, as Nardi argued with co-author Vicki O'Day in Information Ecologies (MIT Press, 1999).

For instance, at one hospital profiled in the book, neurophysiologists had microphones and video cameras installed in operating rooms so they could remotely monitor several neurosurgeries at once, since their physical presence wasn't always required.

Though it made their jobs easier, it also created privacy concerns among the doctors and technicians, who used jokes and off-color banter to ease the stress of the delicate operations, which could last up to 24 hours.

So, too, will there be privacy and security concerns with ContactMap, as Nardi readily acknowledges. "Once you have your map, it's very revealing, very visual, and people can come into your office and look at a glance. It tells a lot about you," she says.

To be really effective, a Web version (which is planned) will be necessary for users to access their social network at anytime over any device.

But this raises the question of who gets to see what information. "You want to be able to share some stuff," but not everything, says Nardi. How do you tell the program which things to share, such as pictures, and with whom? "We have to work through those issues," she says.

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