Carlos Maltzahn, Community Help: Discovering Tools and Locating Experts in a Dynamic Environment , CHI'95 Conference Companion, pp. 260-261

In a research community each researcher knows only a small fraction of the vast number of tools offered in the continually changing environment of local computer net works. Since the on-line or off-line documentation for these tools poorly support people in finding the best tool for a given task, users prefer to ask colleagues. However, finding the right person to ask can be time consuming and asking questions can reveal incompetence. In this paper we present an architecture to a community sensitive help system which actively collects information about Unix tools by tapping into accounting information generated by the operating sys tem and by interviewing users that are selected on the basis of collected information. The result is a help system that continually seeks to update itself, that contains information that is entirely based on the community's perspective on tools, and that consequently grows with the community and its dynamic environment.

Carlos Maltzahn, David Vollmar, ToolBox: A Living Directory For Unix Tools Owned By the Community, Technical Report CU-CS-747-94, University of Colorado at Boulder

Members of a community who work primarily at computer terminals are deprived from distributed cognition as it occurs in many other domains where people work with tools in a shared physical space. This makes it harder for individuals to pick up cues towards useful tools and their utilizations. Traditional help systems were unsuccessful to fill in this gap of information flow. People prefer to consult other people in their community because either their tool knowledge is contextualized appropriately or they know other people who can help. In this paper we describe the design and preliminary evaluation of a system that is actively looking for new tools and is interviewing potential experts. The result of these interviews is presented by weekly newsletters and a hypertext system in World Wide Web format. We specifically address design issues of and experience with the interviewing process and the presentation of the resulting information.