Group awareness support in collaborative writing systems

Collaborative writing systems allow co-authors, spread out across different locations, to work together sharing common documents. One key element that, in most cases, is poorly supported in collaborative writing systems is group awareness. Many research studies have defined several types of group awareness. The paper presents a comparative analysis of workspace and conversational awareness support in collaborative writing systems. For this purpose, we adapted R. Vertegaal's (1997) framework in order to analyze the group awareness mechanisms for collaborative writing. This framework considers the workspace and conversational awareness elements. Based on these elements, we analyzed and compared Quilt, GROVE, PREP, SASSE, Calliope and Alliance collaborative writing systems. Finally, we identified their strengths and weaknesses.