Studying Social Interactions in Groupware Systems

Groupware Systems (GS) support groups of users to, via cooperation, coordination, and communication, achieve a common goal. Technological advance has caused the users requirements become more demanding for the GS, being required for the GS to include social interactions for improving the collaboration of users in a better way. Thereby, it is necessary to find techniques for enhancing and performing tasks in collaborative work. In this paper, we present a review about the works related to the interaction models. In addition, we present the results of an experimental study with 30 users aimed to evaluate the social interactions of a GS (a collaborative videogame - First Person Shooter). The results obtained show that the social interactions can still be improved in such systems, whereby we propose a conceptual model of social interactions to support the collaboration of users. In order to validate our approach we propose a prototype based on Multi-Agent Systems.