Supporting Group Awareness in Alliance

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Supporting Group Awareness in Alliance
Manuel Romero-Salcedo mromeros_at_servidor.unam.mx De
partment of Computer Science LaSCaux
Laboratory Instituto de Investigaciones en
Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México
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LaSCaux Laboratory

• Large Scale Colaborative
• and Distributed Systems

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Objective
One of our main objectives is to design,
develop and evaluate large scale collaborative
and distributed environments taking into account
not only their intrinsical technical difficulties
but also analyzing, understanding and giving an
efficient response to the work practices of its
users.
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Research Interests

• Engineering of Interactive Systems (CSCW and
  Distributed Systems)
• Distributed Information Consistency and Fault
  Tolerance
• CSCW and the Web
• Support for Collaborative Writing

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Some ongoing projects

• Shared Virtual Spaces for Collaborative Writing
• Document Versioning of Structured Documents
• Middleware Architecture for Collaborative Writing
  on the Web
• Synchronous and Asychronous Collaborative Writing
  on the Web
• Group Awareness Support for Collaborative Writing

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Contents

• Introduction Computer Supported Collaborative
  Writing
• Group Awareness
• Document Sharing in Alliance
• Group Awareness Protocol in Alliance
• Discussion

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Introduction

• Several research works have been conducted into
  the way groups write together.
• These research works have been carried out taking
  into account studies of cases, experiments,
  interviews and observations of real situations of
  collaborative writing.
• Surveys on writing have shown that a large number
  of documents are produced through a collaborative
  effort.

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Introduction

• The growth of interdisciplinary studies,
  international projects and distributed work
  groups within large companies, has led to
  pressure on writers to work in collaboration.
• Writing groups may consist of people who rarely
  meet face-to-face, yet they are expected to work
  closely together, and to tight schedules.
• Research in the area of Computer Supported
  Collaborative Writing has studied the process of
  collaborative writing and these studies have led
  to the development of collaborative writing
  systems.

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Collaborative Writing Systems
They allow geographically dispersed group of
authors to work together sharing common
documents.
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Collaborative Writing Systems

• Until now, many collaborative writing systems
  have been developed.
• However, many of the existing systems provide
  inadequate support for the process of
  collaborative writing.
• Those systems mainly focus on implemented-oriented
  problems (concurrency control, network failures,
  data sharing, conflict management, access
  control) while overlooking very important social
  issues (interaction protocols, cognitive models
  of collaborative writing, human factors, conflict
  management).

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Collaborative Writing Systems

• In fact, such systems make collaborative writing
  possible but do not make the collaborative
  writing process easier.
• Nowadays, there is not commercial tool allowing a
  group of authors to create shared documents as
  easily as one can create a single-author document.

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Collaborative Writing

• Collaborative writing is always mediated by some
  form of communication.
• Without communication co-authors could not
  coordinate their efforts.
• Technology can play a pradoxical role in
  coordinating collaboration
• it can severely limit communication
• it can enhance the scope for meaningful
  communication
• In order for communication and collaboration to
  succeed and to be efficient, the co-authors need
  to be aware of each others activities (actions,
  intentions, presence, etc.).

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Awareness in Group Work

• In real life situations, the first step towards
  any kind of interaction among people is the
  ability to sense or become aware of others.
• Failure to become aware of others before engaging
  in activities leads to confusion and is often the
  cause of conflicts.
• Awareness is then fundamental to foster social
  and collaborative activities.

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Awareness in Group Work

• Awareness of others enables communication, which
  in turns enables collaboration with others.
• If we become aware of others, we can engage in a
  variety of social, collaborative and shared
  activities.
• For instance, awareness of the presence and
  activity of others can play an important role in
  enabling effective collaboration among
  distributed work group members.

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Some Definitions of Awareness

• Is an understanding of the activities of others
  which provides a context for your own activity
  Dourish and Belloti, 92.
• Is part of the synergy that allows groups to be
  more effective than individuals Gutwin et al.,
  95.
• Is information about what others are doing to
  efficiently support collaborative work
  Sohlenkamp, 98.
• Is a mental state of the users generated by
  their mutual interactions and by their
  interactions within the shared workspace
  Mendoza et al., 2000.

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Awareness in Collaborative Writing

• During the collaborative writing task, co-authors
  are faced with the problem of keeping each other
  aware of their current activity.
• Awareness of the activity of co-authors is very
  important in many ways coordination of
  activities, anticipation of the actions of others
  and the resolution of ambiguity in communication.
• Some useful information that an author might want
  to know are what one or more of their colleages
  are doing, where they are working and where their
  attention is directed.

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Awareness in Collaborative Writing

• Co-authors have to be provided by sufficient
  context information so that they could be aware
  of any important event coming from other active
  participants.
• Awareness of the joint writing activities enables
  co-authors to guide their individual efforts and
  contribute towards reaching their collaborative
  goal.
• In Alliance, our collaborative writing system, we
  developed a protocol for supporting group
  awareness.

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Alliance
A Collaborative Writing System

• Alliance allows people spread out across
  different locations to work together on document
  production and maintenance.
• The aims of developing Alliance were
• to study and better understand the requirements
  from the authors point of view and
• to develop techniques allowing complex documents
  to be handled more efficiently in a large scale
  distributed environment.

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Alliance

• Alliance is suited to produce complex documents
  (technical structured documents) written by
  several authors working at the same time or at
  different times over the Internet.
• Awareness of activity is triggered when an author
  decides to validate his changes in order to make
  them available to their colleages.
• Co-authors, who are present at that time, can
  also decide to see immediately the changes or to
  ignore them.
• The group awareness protocol was developed on the
  foundation of the Alliances document sharing
  layer.

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Document Sharing

• In Alliance, the way co-authors interact with
  each other is well defined the work is organized
  and each author of the group has a different role
  to play on the project.
• According to the role, documents can be
  automatically and dynamically divided into
  variable-sized sharing units (called fragments).
• For each fragment, any author may play one of the
  four available editing roles (symbolized by
  special icons at the user interface level)

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Editing Roles

• The writer role allows to modify the fragment
  content.
• The reader role allows only to see the fragment.
• The null role does not allow to see the fragment
  (considered confidential).
• The manager role allows to assign or change the
  previous roles, to modify fragment size and to
  modify the fragment content.
• The creator of the document will always hold the
  manager role on the whole document.
• An author playing the manager role is also
  allowed to assign this role to his colleagues.

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A Collaborative Writing Session
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Document Sharing

• The same author may play different roles on
  different fragments.
• He can then be allowed to modify some fragments,
  read only some others, and even not to see the
  rest.
• It is also possible that two or more authors play
  the writer or manager role on the same fragment
  at the same time. However, at any moment, one
  fragment can only be written by at most one
  author.

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Document Sharing

• In a fragmented document, the icons, symbolizing
  current roles, are attached to each fragment (one
  icon by fragment).
• Not only these icons help to know the current
  role played by an author on a fragment, but also
  they work as active buttons that allow co-authors
  to perform collaborative writing actions and to
  be aware of the evolution of the different
  fragments.
• These icons, the four roles and the document
  fragmentation constitute the foundation of the
  group awareness protocol.

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Group Awareness Protocol

• As different authors can play different roles,
  they can see different icons at the same time.
• The four role icons have different transition
  states, showing the status of the fragment that
  follows.
• These icons are active by clicking on them, the
  author can change the status of the associated
  fragment.

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Group Awareness Protocol

• When an icon has the attentive reader state
  , each time a new version of the associated
  fragment is made available by its current author,
  the icon changes to the modified fragment state
  .
• Then, the author may decide to get a new version
  of that fragment by clicking on the icon, which
  returns to the attentive reader state

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Group Awareness Protocol

• The locked reading state indicates that
  the author does not want to be aware of new
  versions of the associated fragment.
• The automatic update state means that he
  wants the fragment to be automatically updated as
  soon as a new version is validated by the current
  author.
• Transitions between the three states locked
  reading , attentive reading and
  automatic update are made by clicking on
  the icon.

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Group Awareness Protocol

• When an author plays the null role on a
  fragment, that fragment is hidden.
• This fact may happen due to the managers will or
  it may be produced by his own decision (to focus
  on other fragments).
• In the latter case, if the author is playing the
  writer or manager role, he gives the opportunity
  to his colleagues of taking his role.
• To recover his original role once again depends
  on the current writing activities of his
  colleagues.

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Group Awareness Protocol

• When an author decides to lower his role on a
  fragment, the corresponding role icon changes and
  it is annotated with an up arrow ? (indicating
  that he can raise once again his role for the
  given fragment).
• If the author is playing the writer or manager
  role, his colleagues will be notified with the up
  arrow too.

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Group Awareness Protocol

• In this case, they are also allowed to raise
  their role. Obviously, the principle of a unique
  author playing the writer or manager role at a
  time for each fragment is guaranteed by the
  Alliances document sharing layer.
• The up arrow appears not only when an author has
  decided to lower his role, but also when an
  author playing the manager role has assigned a
  higher role to the fragment or when the author
  quit his writing session.

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Group Awareness Protocol

• An author playing the null role must be
  aware as soon as the fragment can be accessed for
  reading.
• Then, the icon of the associated fragment changes
  to the modified masked state when this
  event takes place.
• Finally, the locked masked state
  indicates that the author does not want to be
  aware of new writing possibilities on the
  associated fragment, such as modification of the
  fragment content or size and changes of roles.

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Conclusion

• Part of the protocol developed for supporting
  group awareness in Alliance was described.
• To evaluate Alliances group awareness protocol
  in a real-world conditions, we offered to a group
  of co-authors for use in a joint writing task
  (research and technical reports) and we conducted
  some studies to determine how Alliance helps
  them.
• These studies revealed that people found the
  protocol very useful and well adapted to most of
  the real scenarios of collaborative writing.

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Conclusion

• As a more formal study, we have recently made a
  comparative analysis of group awareness support
  in several collaborative writing systems,
  including Alliance.
• For this purpose, we adapted Vertegaal's
  framework, which considers the workspace (who is
  collaborating on what) and conversational
  awareness (who is communicating with whom)
  elements.

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Conclusion

• We found that Alliance was strength in workspace
  awareness and weak in conversational awareness.
• We decided to enhanced the group awareness
  protocol in order to provide co-authors with
  tightly coupled interaction.

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• The End

• Thank you !