Awareness Support in Collaborative System: Reviewing Last 10 Years of CSCW Research

Context] Awareness has been a valuable concept in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work – CSCW – since its formation, and it is an essential part of collaborative systems. The awareness research followed side by side the evolution of the CSCW field over the last decades, and we can see the progress both in a mutual understanding of awareness and in developing concepts and technology of awareness support. [Goal] Using the awareness and collaboration concepts as a starting point, we performed a systematic mapping study to identify the state-of-the-art of approaches, models, methodologies, or processes adopted in the design, development, and evaluation of collaborative applications. We figured out our research through the six most relevant databases/search engines combined with snowballing techniques, and selected 42 papers from 4320 analyzed, considering publications in the last ten years. [Result] We established a conceptual awareness framework composed of five broad dimensions necessary in collaborative applications: contextual, collaboration, situational, workspace, and historical awareness. This framework constitutes a reasonable set of 17 design categories and 92 awareness elements that assists in providing awareness and collaboration aspects in collaborative systems.