visible artifacts

By: Chris Malek

Apr 06 2009

Category: Articles

No Comments »

From the point of view of the designer of a groupware system, there are a number important questions that will drive the incorporation of awareness information into a groupware implementation.

• What is the nature of the goals that will be fulfilled via the system, and what tasks will be performed to achieve those goals?
• What kind of collaboration will be going on: mostly tightly coupled, mostly loosely coupled, or generally mixed-focus?
• What is the nature of the group that will use the system?  How big is the group, and what kind of people are in it?  Do the people in the group know each other outside the system?  Are they collocated and thus have face-to-face interaction in addition to that in the workspace, or do they interact solely through the system?
• What kind of awareness information is necessary to support the tasks and goals given the nature of the group?
• What kind of data is available to the system (through either active or passive gathering) that can be transformed into awareness information?  Dourish and Bellotti (Dourish and Bellotti 1992) say that awareness information should be passively gathered from the normal activities of the group, rather than actively solicited from users.   They claim that active, informational mechanisms are inherently problematic (e.g. subversion or CVS commit logs) because of both the burden on and the dependency on the posting user (Dourish and Bellotti 1992, p. 109).  First, the posting user gets no personal benefit from the update and actually has to do extra work in addition to the work of actually producing the work product.  Secondly, the posting user determines what information to convey and (in some cases) how to convey it.   The posting user has little incentive (beyond social pressure) to provide accurate, detailed, timely and comprehensible information, and at any rate provides only what they think is appropriate, which may not be what others need.   Thus such information is of limited trustworthiness and utility.
• How will the data be represented: situated within the workspace, or separate from it; in literal form or symbolic form?  Gutwin and Greenberg say that the situated-literal approach is “the closest approximation of how awareness information appears in the real world, and is the only one that allows people to use their existing skills with the mechanisms of feedthrough, consequential communication and gestural communication” (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002, p. 30).
• What metaphors can we use to best represent the specific kinds of awareness information we want to present? Gutwin and Greenberg give a sampling of what had been done prior to 2002 (Gutwin and Greenberg, pp. 31-33).
• When and where within the interface will each kind of awareness information be presented?  Dourish and Bellotti say (Dourish and Bellotti 1992) to present the awareness information within the shared workspace alongside the shared object, so that users can see the information and object concurrently, and find the information most relevant to the object, and also to make information available as and when needed as a context for individual activities.  Allow users to see other’s work and actions as they occur and where they occur.

References

1. P. Dourish and V. Bellotti, “Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces,” in CSCW ‘92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, 1992, pp. 107-114.
2. 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.