Are we all condemned to loneliness on the WWW?
This at least is one of the most obvious experiences you make sitting in front of a screen beeing on the web. While millions of people use the WWW at the same time even the same webpages you are unable to get a clue about what's going on.

The WWW is an intransparent place to be, where social context ist missing because of missing information. The most basic information missig is the information about "What's happening around me right now?" or so called contextual information about presence and co-presence. Scientists like Dourish and Bellotti wrote already in 1992 „Awareness of individual and group activities is critical to successful collaboration…“.

Providing context to feel closer to each other
One cause of this lack of awareness might be found in a missing concept of distance metrics for the WWW, which in turn can provide proxemic information (PI) to users. Absence of PI leaves users unaware of their proximate environment.

Such a new social context can be seen as a spatiotemporal context which allows to sense proximity. Providing proxemic information (PI) has doubled activity and time spent on a webpage in a research project at University of Bremen/Germany. Perhaps some of these positive effects could kick off the next social wave of the web.

Discussing possible fields of application for virtual proxemics
Proxemic information enables nonverbal, nonintrusive, communicational behaviour, something that is similar to things done with ambient information devices like the nabaz-tag. But how much more social context would be possible to be established if proxemic information would be available for the whole WWW?

Workshop structure
Part 1 Let me introduce you to the idea and some scientific insights of virtual proxemics
Part 2 In direct person-to-person interaction we will experience proxemic communication
Part 3 We realize a proxemic information think tank (PITT) to think about new ways how to make the WWW a much more social place

I hope I catched your attention, see you all at LIFT09, Helge =)