Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2013) 22:107–112 DOI 10.1007/s10606-012-9185-z
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Differentiated Awareness-Support in Computer Supported Collaborative Work Special Issue Introduction Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten1, Thomas Herrmann2 & Stephan Lukosch1 1
Department of Systems Engineering, Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 5( 2628BX Delft, the Netherlands (E-mail:
[email protected]; E-mail:
[email protected]); 2Institut für Arbeitswissenschaft (IAW), Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Informations- und Technikmanagement, Universitätsstraße 150( 44780 Bochum, Germany (E-mail:
[email protected]) Abstract. Awareness has, for decades, been a topic of interest in CSCW research, as it is a critical condition for effective coordination of collaborative work. In this special issue we present papers that discuss overviews of awareness aspects as well as research challenges for awareness in new settings and conditions. Awareness continues to be a topic of research especially in new (virtual) interaction environments and in various challenging domains in which collaboration is becoming an answer to the increasing complexity of interconnected systems and globalization. Key words: awareness, CSCW, distributed teams, virtual teams, groupwork
1. Introduction The coordination of activities is a major problem when considering teamwork. This is especially true when team members are distributed. Consider, for example, a team of distributed software developers that in parallel changes the source code of a project. Without any kind of support from the software, it is almost impossible to maintain an overview of activities and changes to the source code. Similarly, it is difficult to decide whether one can change a file or whom to contact to discuss possible changes. In order to make such decisions possible, the concept of group awareness has been introduced. Dourish and Bellotti (1992) provided one of the most widely used definitions of awareness by defining it as “an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity.” (Schlichter et al. 1998) extended this definition towards communities and linked it to effectiveness of a team by stating that “awareness is needed in both contact facilitation in communities and teams, and for maintaining team work at a high performance level within the team.” Gutwin et al. (1996) distinguish four types of awareness: group-structural awareness, social awareness, informal awareness, and workspace awareness. Group-structural awareness deals with providing information on
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the different roles and responsibilities in a team, social awareness provides information on the social context of a group, informal awareness deals with general knowledge about a team and workspace awareness provides information about the current status of a workspace and how this state has been achieved. Gutwin et al. (1996) mainly discuss awareness with regard to the current point in time, Tam and Greenberg (2006) extended this understanding towards asynchronous awareness which also addresses questions about the past. The reason for doing this is twofold: first, participants should be given a better understanding of the history of individual and group activities; second, participants are normally not active in a team all the time. Initially, a lot of research has been done supporting workspace awareness. As result, several different tools have been developed to make users aware of each other’s activities in a team. Such tools include user lists which provide an overview of who is currently participating in a session, multi-user scrollbars which provide information about the current work focus of other users, or remote cursors that show a local the work focus of remote users. There have been attempts to collect this recurring elements for achieving workspace awareness within standard toolkits such as MAUI (Hill and Gutwin, 2004). Later, a broader approach has been taken and the core concepts for providing workspace awareness have been collected in a pattern language for computer-mediated interaction (Schümmer and Lukosch, 2007). This pattern language allows end-users, designers and developers to understand the core concepts of providing awareness and use them jointly in a design process. While these patterns provide common solutions for the design of group awareness, important questions about privacy remain, e.g. “How much information about other users’ activities does the system reveal?” or “Can users influence what information is shared?” Very often these questions are answered with the concept of reciprocity, i.e. only the amount of information that a user is willing to share is revealed from other users. Recently, new technologies such as augmented reality created a new space for collaborative interaction (Billinghurst and Kato, 2002). Preliminary results within a crime scene investigation scenario, in which investigators on a crime scene are supported by remote experts, have shown that this upcoming interaction space offers new challenges with regard to presence and awareness (Poelman, et al., 2012), as investigators on the crime scene who transfer a virtual image of the crime scene, observed by experts feel remote controlled by these experts and experts feel that they miss something when not physically being at the crime scene. It is an open question whether the proven concepts of awareness support can be transferred to interaction spaces such as augmented reality or whether completely new approaches are necessary. Besides new interaction spaces, current interaction spaces such as social media also present new awareness challenges. The papers in this special issue for instance address trust building and the inclusion of elderly as challenges, but also sense-making based on immense data streams of different social networks such as Facebook and Twitter require new types of awareness support. Last, it is a well-known problem with awareness mechanisms that the amount of information being presented to the user may appear inappropriate - either too
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little or too much information is displayed. We suggest that this problem can be solved by contextualizing awareness support with respect to the concrete task domain which is addressed by a CSCW software. The last four papers give examples how the features of awareness support can be designed in accordance with the conditions of concretes settings. Future research will have to deal with the question of how awareness support can be adapted to the concrete conditions of tasks and their social, spatial and organizational context. As discussed above, awareness is a topic of continuous attention in the dynamic world of virtual teams, social software and other applications that facilitate online computer supported collaborative work. Current developments in web 2.0 and social networking drive the ‘commodity’ of online interaction and collaboration. Furthermore, increased system complexity and globalization of business, commerce and consequently private networks further requires to work in virtual environments and in interaction with people that are remote. This drive increases the complexity of work; where people were used to work alone or with a few directly accessible peers, software now increasingly offers features to support content related tasks as well as collaboration and interaction with others. This increases the cognitive load of working environments, and makes them more dynamic and interactive (Dillenbourg and Betrancourt 2006). Research has shown that awareness of the actions, emotions and behaviors of others is critical for successful coordination and an enabler for communication. Similarly, awareness becomes increasingly important to create a shared understanding and build up trust (Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1998). To support users in keeping track and overview in such interactive environments, research has studied awareness as ‘attention’ to activities of other team members or the changes they create in a working environment (Dourish & Bellotti, 1992), and as best practices from a technological perspective to offer ‘awareness support’ (Schümmer and Lukosch, 2007). In this special issue we present papers that each discuss a specific aspect of awareness in the context of virtual collaboration or interaction. 2. Overview of articles in the special issue on differentiated awareness-support In this special issue, we compiled six papers on the topic of advanced awareness research for computer supported collaborative work. They represent a selection of the best papers being presented at the CRIWG workshop 2010 in Maastricht. The CRIWG workshops have their roots in the Ibero-American community of researchers, but after its fourth edition in Buzios, Brazil, in 1998, they have evolved to an open and international forum for researchers working in CSCW, CSCL, and their applications. The format of the workshop is based on a small but very active group of participants, extensive time for lively and constructive discussions, and a high level of cooperation both within and between paper sessions. This constructive
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atmosphere generates relevant feedback to the authors, who have used it to improve their work. The new, extended versions of the selected papers went through another round of evaluation by internationally renowned reviewers. The resulting papers are presented in this special issue. We start with two overview papers: “Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development: A Systematic Review and Mapping of the Literature” by Igor Steinmacher, Ana Paula Chaves and Marco Aurelio Gerosa offers a systematic analysis of the state-of-the-art on Awareness Support for distributed software development, an application area in which many awareness functionalities have their origin. The findings show that attention on awareness is increasing in the literature, and that awareness support tools mainly support coordination of collaborative effort. A second overview of awareness support focusses on a more specific aspect of virtual teams, namely the information that is used to establish trust among the team members. In “The Mind’s Eye on Personal Profiles: A Cognitive Perspective on Profile Elements that Inform Initial Trustworthiness Assessments and Social Awareness in Virtual Project Teams” by Ellen Rusman, Jan van Bruggen, Peter Sloep, Martin Valcke and Rob Koper, the authors create an overview of those types of information that people find most effective to assess trustworthiness of another participant in a virtual team. With these overview articles we create a picture of awareness that encompasses both the awareness about other team members as persons, as well as the ways in which we can establish awareness about the relevant actions of others and changes in a virtual collaborative working environment. The next four articles offer studies on more specific aspects of awareness in the context of collaborative modeling, social media and audio based story telling. In the paper “Turning Conflicts into Collaboration” by Konrad Wieland, Philip Langer, Martina Seidl, Manuel Wimmer, Gerti Kappel, the authors present a new approach to versioning in the context of collaborative modeling for software development. In this versioning approach awareness about the conflicts in model versions are considered an important source of information. It is the basis for a process of clarifying the conflict and documenting the understanding gained from this clarification, before a consolidated model is agreed on by the team. In the paper “Awareness support for combining individual and collaborative process design in collocated meetings” by Thomas Herrmann, Alexander Nolte and Michael Prilla, the authors focus on the transition from individual work to collaborative work, a transition in which the need of awareness of the contributions of others emerges gradually during the work process rather than at the start of such process. The paper presents insights from experiments to derive requirements for collaboration support software to facilitate collaborative modeling in an effective socio-technical setting for such transition. In the paper “An Approach for Asynchronous Awareness Support in Collaborative Non-Linear Storytelling” by Jana Schumann, Tanja Buttler and
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Stephan Lukosch, the authors discuss awareness in the context of a software tool to jointly create and analyze an audio based story. The audio files are combined to create a story and this story is represented in a story graph. The awareness support was built to enable detection of a change, in the graph with information on who changed the graph, when, how and what was changed. An experiment shows that the awareness mechanism indeed supports this. Finally in the paper “Ambient awareness to strengthen the social connections between older adults and their relatives” by Raymundo Cornejo, Mónica Tentori and Jesús Favela, awareness is discussed in the intersection of two major trends in today’s society; the growing population of elderly, and the increased use of social media and networks to remain aware of the activities of friends and family. These trends present an associated ‘gap’ of participation of elderly in the daily social ‘updates’ of relatives. The paper presents experiences with a designed solution called Tlatoque; a display through which elderly can follow the information exchange among their family on social networks. The papers each describe a different type of awareness of people and their activities in online environments, and they offer new designs of awareness support tools that can help us to decrease the cognitive effort required to keep track of changes and developments in an increasingly complex online environment. We deem these papers highly interesting and representative of the trends in developing awareness support for virtual teams and interactions.
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Schlichter, Johann, Michael Koch, and Chengmao Xu (1998). Awareness—The Common Link Between Groupware and Community Support Systems. In T. Ishida (ed.): Community Computing and Support Systems: Social Interaction in Networked Communities. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1519. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, pp. 77–93. Schümmer, Till, and Stephan Lukosch (2007). Patterns for Computer-Mediated Interaction. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Tam, James, and Saul Greenberg (2006). A framework for asynchronous change awareness in collaborative documents and workspaces. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 64, no. 7, pp 583–598.
