Towards flexible support for cooperation: group awareness in shared workspaces

In the last decade since computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) constituted as a research area on its own many interesting findings about groups of cooperating individuals, cooperative work, and technical support thereof have been made and a huge variety of groupware applications have been built. However, there is a discrepancy between the theoretical concepts elaborated and the functionality of the groupware applications and shared workspace systems built. Actually most groupware systems and shared workspace systems support only highly specific tasks, situations and forms of group interaction. This paper argues for more flexible groupware applications and shared workspace systems, which adhere to those theoretical concepts, which are integrated smoothly through the provision of group awareness information, and which respect the interdependencies and interplay among them.