Following the ideas of CommunityMirrors, we set up an installation that presents relevant and valuable information to the community: the people working, studying, and visiting the Department of Informatics at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich. This page describes the network of CommunityMirrors we have deployed and its general use. Currently, four CommunityMirrors are deployed at the campus which enables us to provide our own evaluation setting for research projects.
The locations of the CommunityMirrors are the following:
- 41/0400 ground floor: a location where there is a room for workshops with external guests nearby and where there are some bulletin boards for students (showing the results of exams)
- 41/1400 first floor: a location in the open staircase with offices close by
- 41/2400 second floor: a location next to a seminar room and coffee kitchen – so, there is traffic by students and staff
- CASCADA 20 second floor: a location in the open break room of a research group
Active research project use this deployments for their research activities:
- HoPE: a DFG funded research project interested in investigating 24/7 evaluations of large semi-public displays using visual sensors (body tracking) to be able to identify various effects that occur around large displays: Novelty and honeypot.
- DIGICOP: a bidt funded research project that tries to foster proactive knowledge exchange, e.g. by promoting employee (expert) profiles on the CommunityMirrors.
Displayed data and data collection:
As a database we use a CommunityMashup that gathers data from various sources and creates a dataset of interesting content for the CommunityMirrors. This content is categorized as follows:
- (1) People: information about people working in the Informatics department, around the area of the installations. [light blue]
- (2) Organizations: information about (sub-)organizations within the department, as part of the university, and in general. [dark blue]
- (3) Content: information about what the people in our depart- ment are working on, what is taking place (e.g. announcements (of events or other), reports or news, new publications, active (research) projects, announcements of topics for student theses, . . . ). [green]
All these information items consist of a catchy title, an image (wherever possible), and a short abstract with a QR-code to further information on the web. Additionally, all the information items are linked to other information items to create an information graph for browsing.
Users can take information from the screen with them by using the QR codes displayed with all information detail views. The link encoded in the QR-Codes opens a Web-App on the mobile device that shows the information and allows some browsing – See for example https://app.communitymirrors.net/items/a_917
In addition to the interactive application for large interactive screens there are non-interactive applications that draw on the same data and can be used to display a configured subset of the data on non-interactive displays. Examples:
We want to keep the profile data of the people presented up to date, so we have available documentation on how people can update their profiles.