Response to Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces

Summary


In their paper Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces, Dourish and Bellotti investigate ways in which groups of people can work together using software designed to allow them to collaborate. In particular they criticize the approach taken by several previously existing systems where in the coordination and collaborations take place in a framework of explicit coordination using tools such as access control and roles. They propose instead (and show useful) a system that allows less restrictive coordination and relies on awareness of the other people working on the same project to ensure that work proceeds smoothly.

Reaction


Several questions came to my mind while reading this paper, in particular relating to the assumptions regarding implicit and explicit systems for coordination. Coming from a development background the model most frequently used is that of Concurrent Version Control where in workers "check-out" portions of the code-base modify them and then "check-in" the results once their work has  been tested and shown to work correctly (hopefully). This model relies highly on access control and annotation and as such is a good example of an explicit environment for coordination. The strength of this model however makes it possible to leave parts of the code-base unchanged for significant lengths of time without anyone in particular being responsible for it or needing to remember it. The authors address the concept of semi-synchronous work to some extent (largely that it still needs to be investigated), but I think that the successfulness of any type of system like this will depend strongly on the task at hand. It would be interesting to see how systems like ShrEdit would work for long-term, medium-term and short-term software development.