CAWS: An Awareness Based Wiki System to Improve Team Collaboration

Effective collaborative authoring techniques require tools that consider the social aspects of collaboration in addition to the technical aspects. Collaborative authoring is fundamentally different to individual writing because of the communications that must inevitably take place between team members.Despite the fact that collaborative authoring has greatly increased in popularity in recent years, most collaborative authoring efforts are performed using tools that are primarily designed for individual authors. The lack of regard for the collaborative process leads to a number of common problems.This paper presents research into the use of a prototype wiki-based system (CAWS) to more effectively support the collaborative process. The results of two field studies into the use of the system are examined, in order to investigate the effectiveness of the techniques employed by the tool.