F@: A Framework of Group Awareness in Synchronous Distributed Groupware

This paper describes F@ (read as “fat”), our innovative framework of group awareness, which aims to extend our understanding of group awareness and help designers develop awareness mechanisms. First, the abstract level of F@ identifies four awareness schools, including conversational awareness, workspace awareness, contextual awareness and self-awareness. Then, the concrete level of F@ presents some fundamental time-related properties of these four awareness schools using temporal logic expressions. The paper also illustrates examples of how F@ can be applied to the design of awareness mechanisms.