An investigation of groupware support for collaborative awareness through distortion-oriented views

This article reviews models and theoretical frameworks of collaborative awa reness in the use of real-time groupware systems. The review is used to mot ivate and guide an investigation of distortion-oriented mechanisms for supp orting collaborators' fluid and dynamic awareness requirements. We describe our development and evaluation of DOME, a distortion-oriented multiuser ed itor. Although we designed DOME to provide a realistic and useful platform for the investigation of awareness concepts, our evaluation revealed major flaws in its support for distortion-oriented awareness. We analyze the caus e of these errors, some of which were not detected in prior work, and provi de precise formulations that will overcome them.