INFORMAL COMMUNICATION SUPPORT MEDIA FOR ENCOURAGING KNOWLEDGE-SHARING AND CREATION IN A COMMUNITY

In this paper, we propose a new approach to support information-sharing and activation of human networks in an organization. In this approach, someone who wants to know about something displays "what I want to know" on a large screen in a public space to let other people see it. This allows other people near the display to find out what he/she is interested in. If a person who knows about that sees the display by chance, they can talk about it on the spot in a face-to-face manner. Thus, smooth information-sharing can be achieved through spontaneous informal communications, and "know-who" knowledge is gradually accumulated. Based on experiments using a prototype system, we confirmed that this approach is effective for information-sharing and activating human networks.