It's not email. It's not chat. It's Babble.
It started as an effort to overcome the heavy structure and impersonal feel of email and chat rooms. "We wanted to put people back into digital systems, and give them a way to communicate on their terms," says Wendy Kellogg, a cognitive scientist at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. The result is a tantalizingly inviting computer conference system called Babble. With it, participants can chat, conduct serious research, brainstorm, tease one another, voice opinions, ask questions, review what was discussed before they signed on, structure meetings and even receive social cues from other participants.
Existing forms of online communication -- for example, email, chat, newsgroups, buddy lists, instant messaging -- can do some of these things, but the Babble research team decided to start from scratch, beginning with a fresh look at why and how people communicate. One problem they wanted to overcome was the tendency of online conversations to become unfocused in the absence of visual or aural cues. Babble is an experiment to see if providing such social cues can help make online conversations more coherent and productive.
Created by David N. Smith and crafted into its
present form with the help of his colleagues at
Watson, Babble is in essence a portable and highly flexible means of establishing work group communications with a customized set of "rules" created by social conventions. The Babble team, while acknowledging that its work is in a very early stage, sees a potential tool for groups who want a flexible system to define and regulate their own virtual community.
BREAKING THE RULES
By breaking the rules of more formalized electronic collaboration, the Babble team has found a way to better support small to medium-size teams working apart and at different times of the day. Part of the proof: Tom Erickson telecommutes from his home in Minneapolis, and Smith from Connecticut. Team members regularly check in to Babble while traveling to share conference news and highlights, work activities or just unfamiliar scenery. Unlike email, Babble conversations are presented in a single view and segregated into user-defined topics. That enhances the coherence of a conversation and minimizes the need to use awkward mechanisms, such as appending email histories, to convey the context. And, unlike newsgroups or discussion databases, Babble does not require a system coordinator, and supports real-time conversations.
Babble users can set up their own conventions for each conversation. Sometimes everyone talks in a common room. Sometimes two or more people break off for a private chat. No one has to respond moment to moment. Often, team members project the common room discussion onto a wall in their lab and follow the flow of conversation while working on something else. And as the occasion dictates, users can freely mix banter with business, much as people do in face-to-face meetings.
"This 'light' approach," says team member Kellogg, "lets everyone act naturally. It helps all the participants feel like they are part of the group. In a sense, people don't try to communicate. They just talk." It's hard
to explain, admits Erickson, from his home in
Minneapolis, "but when someone in the Babble common area says he has to leave now to take his son to a guitar lesson, that little bit of personal information gives you a lot of clues about the people you are
working with. You feel much more tightly in touch with the group."
SIMULATING SOCIAL CUES
Babble's ability to create a sense of shared intimacy is dramatically enhanced through the use of a "social proxy" that appears at the top center of the Babble window. A circle represents the subject under discussion, and each of the participants is represented as a different colored dot. People who are currently contributing to, or following, the conversation see their dots at the center of the circle; the dots drift toward the border as they become less active. People engaged in different conversations appear outside the circle. "You can tell at a glance who's involved and what topics are currently hot," says Kellogg. Babble's visual representation of people and their conversational activity is an attempt to reestablish in cyberspace the social cues we depend on in the regular world.
The team is also studying a form of relational time stamping. For example, after A makes a comment, B might respond, but an hour or so later. Next to B's response, instead of the time of day, a note would say "one hour later," or "one day later," revealing the tempo of the conversation in a way that conventional time and date stamps obscure. Further enhancements include ways of asking to be notified when someone responds to one's comment. Others can ask to be notified as well -- the group equivalent of camping on or chiming in with a "me, too."
Babble is also a serious knowledge management tool in the conventional sense. The team is developing means of condensing rambling dialogues, as well as the group reactions to the ideas put forward. They are also working on a means of boiling down discussions based on lengthy documents, by excerpting and highlighting relevant passages from long texts and placing them beside each person's comments.
Only a year in the making so far, Babble has been well received by those outside the development group who have had a chance to test it. Says Erin Bradner, a student intern who worked on the project last summer, "Even those who haven't yet made much use of it recognize that something special is going on here." What's special, of course, is that people using Babble feel more like people as they share their expertise over time in the abstract realm of a computer conference.
The potential value of this approach has inspired the formation of a new social computing department,
headed by Kellogg, with special funding from a program designed to support "adventurous" research
projects. The new group will pursue how making people and social behavior more visible in digital
systems can enhance the creation and functioning of collaborative teams.
