Here are some examples that I found from some articles that I read for a project last semester. I think some of them are well suited in the category of knowledge management systems. They integrate many of the technologies that we talk about in class, such as instant messaging, email, etc, to serve communites' interest.
-Everywhere Displays Projector (EDP) by IBM is created to consolidate many access points to information. The EDP displays an application on a surface that users can interact with and runs multiple applications in sequence giving it the ability to localize different information sources. This concept relieves the user from having to check many different knowledge resources, saving time, effort and cost.
(Pinhanez, C (2000). IBM T.J. Augmenting Reality with Projected Interactive Displays. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. P.O. Box 218, New York)
-Nynex Portholes (Lee, Girgensohn, Schlueter, 1997) integrates and builds on past efforts allowing distributed work groups to access knowledge via general and peripheral awareness. This is accomplished by providing access to people via constant video and audio feeds of each other’s movements within an environment. This system increases the awareness of others locations and in so doing increases access to people who provide needed information.
(Lee, A., Girgensohn, A., Schlueter, K. (1997). NYNEX Portholes: Initial User Reactions and Redesign Implications. In GROUP’97, International Conference on Supporting Group Work, ACM, New York, 1997.)
-Portholes is a desktop application that takes information from a central server and displays it to the user. Each user has a camera at his/her workstation, which transmits video signals to the server, allowing any user of the system to see if other users of the system are in their workspaces. While in the picture view mode, people can click on a user’s portrait and send an email or an audio message to him/her directly. The information transferred between users can be in broadcast mode (publicly available) or directed mode (available only to a single user).
(Dourish, P.& Bly, S. (1992). Portholes: Supporting awareness in a distributed work group. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), Monterey, Ck ACM press, 541-547. 21.)
-To make unstructured information more organized, a team of researchers at Microsoft has developed a notification system called Scope (Dantzich, Robbins, Horvitz, Czerwinski, 2001). Scope allows users to stay aware of communications from multiple sources such as email, instant messaging, information alerts and personal calendars.