Grassroots: providing a uniform framework for communicating, sharing information, and organizing people

Abstract

People currently use a disparate set of systems such as email, newsgroups, hypermail, shared Web hotlists, hierar– chical indexes, etc. for activities which oflen cut across the boundaries implicit in each of these systems. Grassroots is a system that provides a uniform user-conceptual model to functionalities currently found in such systems, while not requiring people to give up other systems. It is designed to co-exist with and leverage from existing systems. A prototype implementation has been completed based on a Web http proxy.