How online collaboration systems poorly support workspace awareness, why it matters and what you can do about it
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) applications allow physically separated co-workers to work together in a shared virtual workspace at the same time. These systems do not yet approach the interaction richness of a face-to-face learning situation. In particular, one element poorly supported is workspace awareness.
The term Computer-supported Cooperative Work was coined by Irene Greif in the 1980s to describe the multifaceted area of what was then known as computer conferencing. Yet, CSCW roots date back to the 1960s and 1970s, with the early efforts of the scientific community to explore group communications through computers. Changes in technological capabilities put the industry sector into the picture during the 1980s which was when the buzz-word “groupware” emerged to advertise the computer systems of the time that could support collaborative activities. For research, as well as businesses, effective and efficient collaboration between teams is synonymous to productivity. Particularly in the modern workplace, where team members are located in dispersed locations, the need for the sophisticated digital tools that will enable them to communicate and work quickly and efficiently is of utter importance. CSCW applications can deliver significant value to both businesses and the academic community. Applications such as Google Docs (the technology that supports collaborative writing) and Mattermost (a tool used in the professional setting for the efficient and effective communication of work peers) support the collaboration, coordination, and communication for groups of people.
Active interaction among work peers in CSCW settings may provide benefits for the project but can be also challenging. Participatory methodology (i.e., objectives, planning and decision-making) poses challenges in traditional approaches, such as what user participation means in the context of the paticipatory activity and who has control over the progress of work, the assignment of roles, the sharing and exchange of information, values and opinions.
In natural collaboration, roles are typically fluid and continually re-negotiated, and in the CSCW application, the danger exists of “premature” definition of roles in the collaborative activity. Berger et al. [1] found evidence that “group dynamics are governed in large part, by people’s impression of group members.” It is expected that the social (psychological) processes may give rise to a social space through impression formation and communication behavior may negatively influence communication activities.
In addition, the information provided in the CSCW environment may not be at the appropriate level of specificity for the receiving individuals, or it may not be relevant to their particular activities at the time, or it may reflect different assumptions about aspects of the joint work.
What’s more, delivery of information in a CSCW environment is controlled more by the sender than by the recipient: The information is not continually available to be browsed.
It is not surprising that my field observations using Mattermost report disappointing results in retrieving essential information related to task-specific activities. It is therefore important to secure the presense of a social space that employs the mechanisms necessary to provide the user with awareness on the information, his/her role and group awareness on the others in different contexts.
Mechanisms for sharing awareness information in a CSCW setting are the following:
● Informational mechanisms to provide explicit facilities through which collaborators inform each other of their activities (e.g., annotation, structured or direct messaging).
● Role restrictive mechanisms for explicit support for roles in collaborative systems. These however provide “information” about the activity, not the content. A system of configurable role-assignment eliminates any uncertainty about the character of others’ work by imposing roles on all users.
● Shared feedback mechanisms that allow a continually-updating sense of the actions of individual collaborators and the overall progress of the group through the shared workspace.
Finally, informational mechanisms may at first add extra work load to individuals and may not adopt to users’ individual working styles, but will eventually result in enhancing social interaction, performances, fluid cooperation and collaborative knowledge sharing.
References
[1] Berger, J., Fisek, M.H., Norman, R.Z., & Zelditch, M. (1977). Status Characteristics and Social Interaction. New York: Elsevier.
