Workspace awareness in mobile virtual teams

Staying aware of each other in cooperative team work is something we take for granted in the everyday world, even if collaboration is not continuously face-to-face, and team members frequently shift from group to individual activity during work sessions. Maintaining this intuitive fidelity of awareness, e.g. of team members working in the office next door, is on the other hand something that has proven particularly difficult to attain in distributed collaboration systems, where the social interaction protocol is not as established, and the means for becoming aware of the environment are far less common. The work reported in this paper is focussed on workspace awareness, i.e. the ".. up-to-the-moment understanding of another person's interaction with a shared workspace" [GuGr 99]. Opposed to the traditional understanding of shared workspaces as being bounded spaces where people can see and manipulate artefacts related to their activities (documents in an office, the whiteboard in a lecture hall or assembly lines in a factory), we consider virtual mobile (team) workspace as abstract spaces containing objects that constitute the team work.