Re Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces

The paper analyses how factors like - information sharing, knowledge of group and individual activity, and coordination - are central to successful workspace collaboration. According to the paper, these factors are clearly critical concerns in the design of computer systems to support collaborative Writing; as such, information relating to this paper are classified as Awareness.

The paper goes on to illustrate Awareness as an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for one's personal activity. And such a context is used to ensure that individual contributions are relevant to the group’s Objectives and goals.

Awareness has been extensively studied in human computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW)( Faroog et al 2008). The success of many collaborative systems hinges on effectively supporting awareness of different collaborators, their actions, and the process of creating shared work products. Some case studies, eg ShrEdit, and other approaches were reviewed in detail.

Opinion

Reflecting on the contents of this paper provided new insights to a recently concluded writing collaboration work I did with some research colleagues. The concept of Awareness and how one could use it to interpreted and categorize the actions, motivations and the proclivities of myself and colleagues during the period of our workspace collaboration. I began to appreciate the fact that while we shared a common objective as a group - which was to write the paper and get a good grade for it - there were other motivation's and personal objectives which operated in the background. For example, I realized that while some collaborators within the group were concerned about their section of the project and to get high grades and recognition for their individual work, others were more affected by the desire for the project to succeed as a unit. Again, it now became clear that some group members were more concerned about finishing the work on time - so they could proceed on holidays without worrying about school work - than about the quality of the output or finishing the work to high standards.

This is the main thing I took away from this paper :

The Awareness syndrome: the insights it can reveal about workspace collaborations and the challenges it brings.

References

Dourish, P., and Bellotti, V. (1992). Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In Proceedings of the conference on computer supported cooperative work (Toronto, Canada, October 31–November 4, 1992) (pp. 107–113). New York, NY: ACM Press.

Farooq, U., Ganoe, C., Carroll, J., Councill, I., and Giles, C. (1998) .Design and evaluation of awareness mechanisms in CiteSeer. Information Processing & Management, 2008, 44, 596-612.