visible artifacts

By: Chris Malek

Apr 05 2009

Category: Articles

No Comments »

Greenberg et. al. identify four kinds of awareness that people in collaborating groups maintain:

• Personal awareness: “information that users maintain about themselves and their roles in the group.  It can be synchronous (eg. current whereabouts within the system) or asynchronous (e.g. where the user has been within the system)” (Liccardi et. al. 2008, p. 2)
• Informal awareness: “a general sense of who’s around and what they are up to [...]  Informal awareness facilitates casual interaction” (Greenberg et. al. 1996, p. 3)
• Social awareness: “information that a person maintains about others in a social or conversational context: whether a person is paying attention, their emotional state, and their level of interest.  It is maintained through back-channel feedback, and through non-verbal cues like eye contact, facial expression, and body language” (Greenberg et. al. 1996, p. 3).
• Group-structural awareness: “knowledge about such things as people’s roles and responsibilities, their positions on an issue, their status and group processes” (Greenberg et. al. 1996, p. 3)
• Workspace awareness: “concerns user presence in the workspace and what users are currently doing: up-to-the-minute knowledge about other people’s interactions with the workspace”  (Liccardi et. al. 2008, p. 2)  This means knowledge of where others are working, what they are doing, and what they are going to do next, and where they’re going to do it.  “This information is useful for many of the activities of collaboration — for coordinating action, managing coupling, talking about the task, anticipating other’s actions and finding opportunities to assist one another” (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002, p. 3).

Liccardi et. al. (Liccardi et. al. 2008) represent these different kinds of awareness with the following diagram, extending the work of Greenberg et. al. (Greenberg et. al. 1996):

which shows workspace awareness as being comprised of the other kinds of awareness plus knowledge specific to the shared workspace.

References

• S. Greenberg, C. Gutwin, and A. Cockburn, “Awareness through fisheye views in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware,” in GI ‘96: Proceedings of the conference on Graphics interface ‘96, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1996, pp. 28-38.
• C. Gutwin and S. Greenberg, “A descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 11, pp. 411-446, 2002.
• I. Liccardi, H. C. Davis, S. White, and H. S. O. Southampton, “CAWS: Visualizing awareness to improve the effectiveness of co-authoring activities,” Special issue of Collaborative Computing in IEEE Distributed Systems Online, 2008.