Group awareness for collaborative tasks

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I was getting more spam comments than 'real' comments, so I've disabled all blog comments and diverted the links to Tribe. I enjoy your comments when they come in - really I do! But Tribe is better equipped to handle spam as well as discussion threads. If you know of interesting papers, please post the links to Tribe so that everyone can have a look. Just click the 'comments' link below. Or if you're really shy you can just mail me directly. =)

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And now back to our previously scheduled programming...

This paper reviews several types of group awareness (GA) interface enhancements as well as advocating the usage of several new ones.

Reviewed are:
- telepointers
- radar views
- multi-user scrollbars
- distortion-oriented views

The paper has a pretty strange definition of bottom-up and top-down, and of what user-centered means, but it does provide some interesting discussion on how to provide GA and what groups need to perform tasks.

All of these solutions are working within the boundaries of the limited screen space of a full-sized monitor. Group tasks done using mobile devices will obviously have to find other solutions to these problems. An interesting question is whether collaboration needs to be a degraded experience while working with a smaller screen device.

Methodologies and Mechanism Design in Group Awareness Support for Internet-Based Real-Time Distributed Collaboration, 2003
Minh Hong Tran, Gitesh K. Raikundalia, and Yun Yang
[full-text pdf]