A framework for awareness support in groupware systems

Abstract

This paper introduces a framework for awareness support in groupware systems. Awareness gathers the group knowledge, its activities and its overall status. Awareness support is an important feature for groupware systems. It provides a context for individual contributions, improving these contributions and avoiding contradictory interactions among group members. Despite its importance, awareness support is not systematic and developers must build it from scratch for each new application. The framework presented here addresses this issue. This framework, called Big Watch (BW), intends to support groupware implementers to easily build past event awareness mechanisms. It has been designed to develop new groupware applications and to improve existing ones. This paper presents the features and the structure of BW, and describes two applications that use it.

Introduction

To get most things done in an organization nowadays requires a great collaborative effort. Knowledge sharing is the key factor of collaborative environments, especially those that support design tasks, due to its natural knowledge exchange. To be shared, knowledge has to be externalized and made visible to potential recipients, either humans or software agents.

There are many articles dedicated to knowledge representation and ways to make it explicit in design environments [1], [2]. A member of a design group makes his knowledge explicit when he/she translates it into some representations supported by the environment. However, it is not enough to make knowledge explicit; it is also necessary to provide group members with mechanisms that inform that the knowledge is there. Only when a group member perceives a new knowledge may the socialization process occur [3].

The contextual information about group members work is usually provided by awareness mechanisms [4]. According to Paul Dourish (1992), ‘Awareness is an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity. This context is used to ensure that individual contributions are relevant to the group’s activity as a whole, and to evaluate individual actions with respect to group goals and progress’. Awareness mechanisms are therefore essential to group support systems in order to transform irregular interactions of group members into a consistent and perceptive performance over time [5].

On the other hand, depending on its quantity, awareness information can also be very distracting and harmful to individual activities when the mechanism does not accommodate individual needs and preferences. Information overload is a well-known phenomenon resulting from this inadequacy. Thus, awareness support should be a major concern when designing groupware systems.

However, systematic solutions for the awareness support are not common. Due to their complexity, awareness mechanisms are either inexistent or provide limited support to knowledge perception. Besides, the implementation of an awareness mechanism requires a great effort from groupware developers when they build this support from scratch. Groupware implementers often do not have any framework or toolkit to help them, and the reuse of code from other applications is not an easy task.

We designed a framework, called Big Watch (BW), to help groupware developers to implement awareness mechanisms in groupware systems. In its first version, it aims to supporting past event awareness. It has been designed to be flexible enough to improve existing groupware applications and also to help implementers to incorporate awareness mechanisms when building new applications. In this paper, we describe the characteristics and the structure of the BW framework.

Our goal with BW has two sides. First, we want to facilitate the work of groupware implementers by providing them with a framework that incorporates most of the awareness functionality. This should reduce the required work to implement a complex mechanism and save time to dedicate other important issues in the application. Second, we want to develop a framework that can be extended to incorporate new mechanism and filters whenever the groupware application requires them.

The paper is organized as follows: first, we discuss the importance of the awareness support in groupware systems and present some related works. Then, the framework is presented, first through its main characteristics, then through the presentation of its structure. Once the framework is presented, we show how to use this framework and describe some applications that already use it. Finally, a few conclusions are presented.