Activity Awareness: A Framework for Sharing Knowledge of People, Projects, and Places

Abstract

In this paper we describe the concept of activity awareness, which gives workers indications of what is happening and what has happened recently in collaborative activities. The key feature of activity awareness is the use of individual workspaces, as opposed to shared workspaces. We introduce an activity representation that can be extracted from workers’ individual workspaces. By using extracted activity information, it extends the scope of awareness from tight collaboration within a shared workspace to more loose collaboration. It enables workers to be aware of the latest information created within other members’ individual environments and of the progress made by loosely connected groups. We introduce three awareness nodes: people, projects, and places. In our model, individual activities interact at these awareness nodes. Our current implementation adopts a temporally threaded workspace model for representing individual activities and introduces an awareness presentation schema for representing the three awareness nodes. The temporally threaded workspace model captures a worker’s activity as a sequence of changes to the information space of the individual’s workspace. An awareness presentation schema generates web pages to show awareness information about the monitored activities.