The awareness assessment model: measuring awareness and collaboration support over participant's perspective

Awareness has been a valuable concept in collaborative systems since its formation, an essential part of groupware. Awareness research followed the evolution of the whole field over the last decades. We can see the progress in a mutual understanding of awareness and developing concepts and technology of awareness support. An efficient awareness mechanism ensures a better understanding and, consequently, a better projection of future actions; in contrast, the lack of these mechanisms undermines comprehension and prevents participants from projecting their work accordingly. Few works present methods or processes that assist in providing awareness in groupware systems; most common strategies focus on the design/development stages or are ad-hoc evaluation models. Furthermore, there are no standardized tests for awareness assessment; thus, measures must be established to assess awareness and identify the criteria for achieving awareness indicators. This work establishes an assessment model for collaborative interfaces by analyzing the awareness mechanisms provided from the participant's viewpoint. In this model, we consider the participant's skill in understanding the awareness and the difficulty involved, providing advances toward designing, developing, and evaluating groupware systems. The proposed assessment model allows us to measure the awareness support provided considering the collaboration, workspace, and contextual awareness perspectives. Assuming a plural collaborative environment, where different participants with different skills, knowledge, and wisdom meet and interact, this model seeks to build a more faithful representation of these existing profiles across a broad spectrum of individual abilities.