WWG: a Wide-Area Infrastructure for Groups

Group learning at Internet scale is becoming more frequent in university courses. This complex process requires support by distributed computing learning support infrastructures. This paper describes the design of WWG: a distributed and decentralized infrastructure with the aim of supporting distributed group learning and team work, centered on the distribution of events, so that every participant can be notified and thus be aware of the actions, changes, progress of the groups he belongs to: synchronous awareness for asynchronous work. The design issues, requirements and the resulting architecture are presented. WWG is based on a multicast mechanism for event distribution with meta-information agents responsible for the dissemination and transformation of events, repository agents responsible for the storage of group information and use agents responsible for the representation of users (sources and sinks of events).