Evaluation of Existing Group Awareness Mechanisms in a Real-time Distributed Collaborative Writing System

Group awareness is very important for successful collaborative writing. Our research thereby evaluates some existing awareness mechanisms regarding their effectiveness in achieving group awareness. Accordingly, we formulate the research question of whether the existing awareness mechanisms are effective enough to obtain group awareness and what are the problems of these current awareness mechanisms. We evaluate these awareness mechanisms by conducting usability experiments using the CoWord collaborative document writing system.