Awareness and teamwork in computer-supported collaborations

A contemporary approach to describing and theorizing about joint human endeavor is to posit 'knowledge in common' as a basis for awareness and coordination. Recent analysis has identified weaknesses in this approach even as it is typically employed in relatively simple task contexts. We suggest that in realistically complex circumstances, people share activities and not merely concepts. We describe a framework for understanding joint endeavor in terms of four facets of activity awareness: common ground, communities of practice, social capital, and human development. We illustrate the sort of analysis we favor with a scenario from emergency management, and consider implications and future directions for system design and empirical methods.