Response:Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware

This paper begins with the concept of workspace awareness -knowing what are others are working on, where they are working and what will they do next. In the "Is Paper Safer article"  they gave an example that when a group of controllers need to change shifts they first watch the control room activities to get the picture of the current situation before they take over.

This paper is trying to study face-to-face groupware systems in order to outline the major requirements for a real-time groupware system.

The paper looked into three issues:

1. Type of information people look for to be aware of the shared workspace : Who, what, where, when and how and the awareness of the past.
2. How people acquire workplace information: Watching other people work, use the system, listen and observe intentional and unintentional gestures.
3. How acquired information is used in collaboration: Shifting between individual and shared work based on the current requirement and state, coordinating activities, predicting behaviour, assisting each other.

Finally the paper highlights some points that need to be kept in mind before designing a realtime groupware system. Accurate Representation of people and there actions in the system, such as representation what are they working on and where, what artifacts are they looking, and working on and how to communicate gestures.

Conclusion:

I feel that this was a good article on what groupware systems should concentrate on regardless of design issues. However, there were no examples or comparisons with existing groupware systems.