Supporting Group Awareness in Alliance

Manuel Romero-Salcedomromeros@servidor.unam.mx

Department of Computer ScienceLaSCaux Laboratory

Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en SistemasUniversidad Nacional Autónoma de México

LaSCaux Laboratory

Large Scale Colaborative

and Distributed Systems

Objective

One of our main objectives is to design, develop and evaluate large scale collaborative and distributed environments taking into account not only their intrinsical technical difficulties but also analyzing, understanding and giving an efficient response to the work practices of its users.

Research Interests

Engineering of Interactive Systems (CSCW and Distributed Systems)

Distributed Information Consistency and Fault Tolerance

CSCW and the Web Support for Collaborative Writing

Some ongoing projects

Shared Virtual Spaces for Collaborative Writing Document Versioning of Structured Documents Middleware Architecture for Collaborative

Writing on the Web Synchronous and Asychronous Collaborative

Writing on the Web Group Awareness Support for Collaborative

Writing

Introduction: Computer Supported Collaborative Writing

Group Awareness Document Sharing in Alliance Group Awareness Protocol in Alliance Discussion

Contents

Introduction

Several research works have been conducted into the way groups write together.

These research works have been carried out taking into account studies of cases, experiments, interviews and observations of real situations of collaborative writing.

Surveys on writing have shown that a large number of documents are produced through a collaborative effort.

Introduction

The growth of interdisciplinary studies, international projects and distributed work groups within large companies, has led to pressure on writers to work in collaboration.

Writing groups may consist of people who rarely meet face-to-face, yet they are expected to work closely together, and to tight schedules.

Research in the area of Computer Supported Collaborative Writing has studied the process of collaborative writing and these studies have led to the development of collaborative writing systems.

Collaborative Writing SystemsThey allow geographically dispersed group of authors

to work together sharing common documents.

Collaborative Writing Systems

Until now, many collaborative writing systems have been developed.

However, many of the existing systems provide inadequate support for the process of collaborative writing.

Those systems mainly focus on implemented-oriented problems (concurrency control, network failures, data sharing, conflict management, access control) while overlooking very important social issues (interaction protocols, cognitive models of collaborative writing, human factors, conflict management).

Collaborative Writing Systems

In fact, such systems make collaborative writing possible but do not make the collaborative writing process easier.

Nowadays, there is not commercial tool allowing a group of authors to create shared documents as easily as one can create a single-author document.

Collaborative Writing Collaborative writing is always mediated by some form of

communication.

Without communication co-authors could not coordinate their efforts.

Technology can play a pradoxical role in coordinating collaboration: it can severely limit communication it can enhance the scope for meaningful communication

In order for communication and collaboration to succeed and to be efficient, the co-authors need to be aware of each other’s activities (actions, intentions, presence, etc.).

Awareness in Group Work

In real life situations, the first step towards any kind of interaction among people is the ability to sense or become aware of others.

Failure to become aware of others before engaging in activities leads to confusion and is often the cause of conflicts.

Awareness is then fundamental to foster social and collaborative activities.

Awareness in Group Work

Awareness of others enables communication, which in turns enables collaboration with others.

If we become aware of others, we can engage in a variety of social, collaborative and shared activities.

For instance, awareness of the presence and activity of others can play an important role in enabling effective collaboration among distributed work group members.

Some Definitions of Awareness Is “an understanding of the activities of others which provides a context

for your own activity” [Dourish and Belloti, 92].

Is “part of the synergy that allows groups to be more effective than individuals” [Gutwin et al., 95].

Is “information about what others are doing to efficiently support collaborative work” [Sohlenkamp, 98].

Is “a mental state of the users generated by their mutual interactions and by their interactions within the shared workspace” [Mendoza et al., 2000].

Awareness in Collaborative Writing

During the collaborative writing task, co-authors are faced with the problem of keeping each other aware of their current activity.

Awareness of the activity of co-authors is very important in many ways: coordination of activities, anticipation of the actions of others and the resolution of ambiguity in communication.

Some useful information that an author might want to know are: what one or more of their colleages are doing, where they are working and where their attention is directed.

Awareness in Collaborative Writing

Co-authors have to be provided by sufficient context information so that they could be aware of any important event coming from other active participants.

Awareness of the joint writing activities enables co-authors to guide their individual efforts and contribute towards reaching their collaborative goal.

In Alliance, our collaborative writing system, we developed a protocol for supporting group awareness.

Alliance

Alliance allows people spread out across different locations to work together on document production and maintenance.

The aims of developing Alliance were

to study and better understand the requirements from the author’s point of view and

to develop techniques allowing complex documents to be handled more efficiently in a large scale distributed environment.

A Collaborative Writing System

Alliance

Alliance is suited to produce complex documents (technical structured documents) written by several authors working at the same time or at different times over the Internet.

Awareness of activity is triggered when an author decides to validate his changes in order to make them available to their colleages.

Co-authors, who are present at that time, can also decide to see immediately the changes or to ignore them.

The group awareness protocol was developed on the foundation of the Alliance’s document sharing layer.

Document Sharing

In Alliance, the way co-authors interact with each other is well defined: the work is organized and each author of the group has a different role to play on the project.

According to the role, documents can be automatically and dynamically divided into variable-sized sharing units (called fragments).

For each fragment, any author may play one of the four available editing roles (symbolized by special icons at the user interface level):

Editing Roles

The writer role allows to modify the fragment content.

The reader role allows only to see the fragment.

The null role does not allow to see the fragment (considered confidential).

The manager role allows to assign or change the previous roles, to modify fragment size and to modify the fragment content.

The creator of the document will always hold the manager role on the whole document.

An author playing the manager role is also allowed to assign this role to his colleagues.

A Collaborative Writing Session

Document Sharing

The same author may play different roles on different fragments.

He can then be allowed to modify some fragments, read only some others, and even not to see the rest.

It is also possible that two or more authors play the writer or manager role on the same fragment at the same time. However, at any moment, one fragment can only be written by at most one author.

Document Sharing

In a fragmented document, the icons, symbolizing current roles, are attached to each fragment (one icon by fragment).

Not only these icons help to know the current role played by an author on a fragment, but also they work as active buttons that allow co-authors to perform collaborative writing actions and to be aware of the evolution of the different fragments.

These icons, the four roles and the document fragmentation constitute the foundation of the group awareness protocol.

As different authors can play different roles, they can see different icons at the same time.

The four role icons have different transition states, showing the status of the fragment that follows.

These icons are active: by clicking on them, the author can change the status of the associated fragment.

Group Awareness Protocol

When an icon has the attentive reader state , each time a new version of the associated fragment is made available by its current author, the icon changes to the modified fragment state .

Then, the author may decide to get a new version of that fragment by clicking on the icon, which returns to the attentive reader state

Group Awareness Protocol

The locked reading state indicates that the author does not want to be aware of new versions of the associated fragment.

The automatic update state means that he wants the fragment to be automatically updated as soon as a new version is validated by the current author.

Transitions between the three states locked reading , attentive reading and automatic update are made by clicking on the icon.

Group Awareness Protocol

When an author plays the null role on a fragment, that fragment is hidden.

This fact may happen due to the manager’s will or it may be produced by his own decision (to focus on other fragments).

In the latter case, if the author is playing the writer or manager role, he gives the opportunity to his colleagues of taking his role.

To recover his original role once again depends on the current writing activities of his colleagues.

Group Awareness Protocol

When an author decides to lower his role on a fragment, the corresponding role icon changes and it is annotated with an up arrow (indicating that he can raise once again his role for the given fragment).

If the author is playing the writer or manager role, his colleagues will be notified with the up arrow too.

Group Awareness Protocol

In this case, they are also allowed to raise their role. Obviously, the principle of a unique author playing the writer or manager role at a time for each fragment is guaranteed by the Alliance’s document sharing layer.

The up arrow appears not only when an author has decided to lower his role, but also when an author playing the manager role has assigned a higher role to the fragment or when the author quit his writing session.

Group Awareness Protocol

An author playing the null role must be aware as soon as the fragment can be accessed for reading.

Then, the icon of the associated fragment changes to the modified masked state when this event takes place.

Finally, the locked masked state indicates that the author does not want to be aware of new writing possibilities on the associated fragment, such as modification of the fragment content or size and changes of roles.

Group Awareness Protocol

Conclusion

Part of the protocol developed for supporting group awareness in Alliance was described.

To evaluate Alliance’s group awareness protocol in a real-world conditions, we offered to a group of co-authors for use in a joint writing task (research and technical reports) and we conducted some studies to determine how Alliance helps them.

These studies revealed that people found the protocol very useful and well adapted to most of the real scenarios of collaborative writing.

Conclusion

As a more formal study, we have recently made a comparative analysis of group awareness support in several collaborative writing systems, including Alliance.

For this purpose, we adapted Vertegaal's framework, which considers the workspace (who is collaborating on what) and conversational awareness (who is communicating with whom) elements.

Conclusion

We found that Alliance was strength in workspace awareness and weak in conversational awareness.

We decided to enhanced the group awareness protocol in order to provide co-authors with tightly coupled interaction.