Selectivity of awareness components in asynchronous CSCW environments

Several proposals are found in literature, seeking above all, to reduce the information overload imposed on the participants of a group. Some of them are based on the use of filters to select the information according to the users' history of accesses. However, in most cases the filtering mechanisms cannot be determined by the users, thus not allowing them to concentrate on sets of information of their interest. This work presents the main issues related to the problem of selectivity of awareness information in asynchronous environments for cooperative work. It describes some mechanisms to allow each user to set his own filtering profile, which best supports his current activities.