Multimedia Fliers: Information Sharing With Digital Community Bulletin Boards

Abstract

Community poster boards serve an important community building function. Posted fliers advertise services, events and people’s interests, and invite community members to communicate, participate, interact and transact. In this paper we describe the design, development and deployment of several large screen, digital community poster boards, the Plasma Posters, within our organization. We present our motivation, two fieldwork studies of online and offline information sharing, and design guidelines derived from our observations. After introducing the Plasma Posters and the underlying information storage and distribution infrastructure, we illustrate their use and value within our organization, summarizing findings from qualitative and quantitative evaluations. We conclude by elaborating socio-technical challenges we have faced in our design and deployment process.