Narine, T., Leganchuk, A., Mantei, M. Buxton, W. (1997). Collaboration awareness and its use to consolidate a disperse group.

Communication often drops dramatically between group members who move a significant distance from their work group despite the provision of mediated communication support. Although the poor quality of the communication exchange via mediated communication is certainly responsible for a significant portion of this drop, lowered suggestion, availability and comfortableness of the communication contact may also cause a drop. With the intent of re-creating these background contact characteristics found in a co-located group, low resolution video pictures of widely dispersed co-workers were exchanged and displayed on each others' workstations via a system called Postcards. Data on system usage was logged and also collected by questionnaire administration. The study found that all users (close and far) tended to use the system extensively for coordinating telephone calls and visits. Users also reported knowing more about what is happening at work and knowing more about their co-workers time pressures. They saw no change in the amount of telephone traffic, E-mail or informal meetings that took place. Thus, Postcards provided useful cues for contact coordination but did not affect the frequency of communication. In addition, the computer logs showed that the foreground activities of locating and seeking contact information were weakly used in contrast to the report of high usage of the picture display. Overall, the results suggest that the continued awareness of both the presence of one's co-workers and a knowledge of their contactability state are a useful part of maintaining distant contacts