Awareness and Cooperative Work: The POLITeam Approach

This paper investigates design issues which support awareness in collaborative environments. The work we present is part of the POLITeam project, an ongoing research effort aimed at the development of electronic tools to support the cooperation of German government sites distributed between Bonn and Berlin. The paper addresses social, ethical, legal, and technical issues which form important prerequisites for the design of awareness functionality in large organizations. These aspects have been identified as the result of a tight interaction process among the systems developers and selected pilot users in a federal ministry. Based on these requirements, we present the architectural model of the awareness service of the POLITeam system. 1

Abstract

om Presenting the activities of others at the user interface—thereby providing awareness—is a crucial aspect of CSCW systems. However, this problem is often neglected by existing designs. This paper discusses design requirements, introduces a notification design framework and describes the functionality of POLIAwaC, a groupware client aimed specifically at supporting awareness. POLIAwaC provides a variety of different graphical notification mechanisms which can be coupled to specific working situations using the AREA model. We also report on the evaluation of the system under real-life conditions in a German federal ministry

Integrating Meeting Capture within a Collaborative Team Environment

Werner Beyer and Shshrokh Daijavad (of IBM T. J. Watson) Ludwin Fuchs, Steven Poltrock (of Boeing Mathematics & Computing Technology)Meeting capture has been a common subject of research in the ubiquitous computing community for the past decade. However, the majority of the research has focused on technologies to support the capture and not enough on the motivation for accessing the captured record and the impact on everyday work practices based on extended authentic use of a working capture and access system. Our long-term research agenda is to build capture services for distributed workgroups that provide approximate motivation and further understand how access of captured meetings impacts work practices. To do this, we have developed a testbed for meeting capture as part of a larger distributed work system called TeamSpace. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for meeting capture within TeamSpace, describe the initial prototype developed, and report on initial usage