Response: Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces

Summary

The paper discusses the idea of “Awareness” or the “understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context (content and character of individual contributions) for your own activity,” and how it is, together with group activities, is essential to a successful collaboration. Unfortunately, they claim that traditional approaches to the provision of awareness information in particular CSCW systems are flawed.

The systems described in the paper (Quilt, PREP, and GROVE) have various approaches in providing Awareness information but listed below are the main distinctions:

1. The awareness information is explicitly generated (users have to do this themselves) and is separated from the work object.
2. The awareness information is passively collected and distributed and is presented in the same work space.

The paper claims that the designers of the three aforementioned systems acknowledges the importance of issues such as information sharing and coordination support mechanisms but have approached them problematically.

Mechanisms such as Informational and Role-Restrictive approaches (Quilt and PREP) are useful in conveying progress and joint activity within the collaborators, but users who provide the information do not benefit directly. Apparently, this cost over benefit miss-matching is a cause of failure in some CSCW systems. There is also a trade-off between heightened awareness and restriction of potential activities of individuals. This also does not adjust for dynamic role changes that are present in CSCW. Another problem is that individuals may benefit from the action of one group member in reporting activity although not guaranteed. Individuals receive what the initiator deems to be appropriate which can only be determined in the context of the other individual’s activities. Lastly, Delivery is controlled more by the sender than the recipient.

In contrast to the previous approaches, the paper proposes a shared feedback approach. Shared feedback presents information about individual activities in a shared workspace. They did a case study of ShrEdit, a synchronous multi-user text editor which runs on a network of Macintoshes. It allows multiple users to edit a set of documents collaboratively but it does not have telepointers that shows other individual’s mouse-cursor movements to others. It also avoids imposing a structure on user’s activities which allows users to adopt very different working styles.

From the study the authors found that the degree of freedom ShrEdit gives is positive. The lack of structure removed work constraints and the continuous awareness allowed the users to be more dynamic and opportunistic. However the lack of telepointers or feedback about what others were doing was problematic.

In their discussion, they proposed an alternative approach for shared feedback – to automate collection and distribution of information, and to present it as background information within a shared space. They also talked about employing Semi-synchronous systems which allows collaborators to not be virtually present and working at the same time.

Reflection

Interesting view about how awareness should be both about content and character of the individual’s work. The study with ShrEdit however said that the participants already have worked together before and had practice using the system before undergoing the study. I think they should use people who have no prior knowledge of how each other work habits. I believe this will allow them to deduce if other individuals can actually be able to see and understand what another collaborator is doing through the system.