iChi is a large public touchscreen display, supporting informal communication within and between communities at the Canvas Gallery Cafe at 9th and Lincoln in San Francisco.

iChi is a new deployment of the Plasma Poster Network from the Social Computing Group at FXPAL (Elizabeth Churchill, Les Nelson, Laurent Denoue, and Paul Murphy). Plasma Poster networks let authenticated members post content to large touchscreens in public places. User-posted content takes the form of Web pages, images, MPGs, or formatted email messages. Unlike previous Plasma Posters, iChi is deployed outside of a corporation in a very public place that serves many diverse communities. iChi supports six channels or categories of posted content: Canvas, music, open-mic, art, scribbles, and communities.

Secure Web-based management pages support content posting and maintenance of meta-information about members and member-posted content.

Jonathan Helfman designed and implemented the Web pages. Helfman created the logo in Illustrator and the channel icons using Flash and Photoshop. He shot hundreds of photographs at the Canvas, which he worked into the Web pages as background textures. He wrote the HTML, JavaScript, JSPs, and several of the Java Bean methods that query the MySql database to return information about iChi members and their posted content.

The scrapbook provides an online interface to a historical archive of postings. The main scrapbook page shows thumbnail images of the four most recent postings in each channel.

Select a channel button to see the entire channel. Select any thumbnail to view or modify the associated posting.