Articulating collaborative contributions to activity awareness

Groups engaged in collaborative activities of significant scope and duration must achieve and maintain awareness of diverse aspects of their shared activity in order to coordinate effectively. For example, they must verify mutual presence and attention, which is fairly straightforward in face-to-face interaction, but often subtle, difficult, and a continuing challenge in computer-mediated collaboration. Members need to know what tools and resources they have access to and also what tools and resources their counterparts can access. The availability of tools and resources may change throughout the course of an activity. The group must have an understanding of who among them might know potentially relevant information or know how to do something that might be critical to the collective endeavor. Members need to know something of their partners’ attitudes and goals and of what their partners expect from them and of the activity. They need to know what criteria their partners will use to evaluate joint outcomes, the moment-to-moment focus of their attention and action during the collaborative work, and how the view of the shared plan and the work actually accomplished evolves over time. All of these intentional variables change constantly as the task context itself changes.