Document Related Awareness Elements in Synchronous Collaborative Authoring

Simultaneous collaboration on documents by distributed authors has been supported by numerous synchronous collaborative authoring systems that are widely available. Originally, these tools were found to lack in providing rich enough interaction during authoring. As a result, group awareness in collaborative authoring arose as a very important issue in understanding how to provide comprehensive knowledge about other authors and activities t h q pegorm upon the document. To promote efectual authoring of documents simultaneously, group awareness is required to allow authors the best possible understanding of others' work on the document. This paper reports results about document-related awareness elements from an empirical and experimental study of group awareness. Awareness elements reflect findarnental awareness information in supporting grozp awareness. Such results teach us what sort of document-related awareness should be use tools like email or workflow to write parts of a document asynchronously, whilst other parts are written together synchronously using the RDCWS. More importantly, these tools are not used as widely as they could possibly be used. One of the reasons for insufficient usage of RDCWS is that existing RDCWS have not supported the richness and diversity of interaction found face-to-face. Figure 1 shows a screen capture of REDUCE, which was the RDCWS used in this research. The Figure shows two users writing a document with REDUCE. The two background colours highlight the text entered by each of the two users. Essentially, REDUCE can be understood as being a collaborative equivalent of a single-user word processor. Understanding current, past or even future work on a document is essential for human interaction. People find it simple when face-to-face to gain a sense of awareness about who is present, what are their responsibilities, what they are doing and where provided for collnborntive authoring. they are located. When group members &e (lispersed, supporting interaction is far more problematic due to K e ~ o r d s Document management, different reasons such as limited views or document authoring, group awareness. poor communication [4]. Hence, there is a tremendous need for group awarenars to provide the