Rejected from CSCW’02 1 Supporting “nomadic awareness ” and team working through visually augmenting broadcast communication

* Mike Scaife died suddenly and unexpectedly while we were revising the paper. His contribution to the research was instrumental. Nomadic team working involves close-knit groups collaborating over a large geographical space performing time-critical tasks. We present an ethnographic study of the way a dispersed team of technicians coordinate their work, highlighting the phenomenon of extraneous ‘detective work ’ – where much communication, via walkie-talkies, needs to take place when uncertainty arises in their work. We suggest one way of providing better nomadic awareness is to visually augment verbal communication. We describe a distributed system we designed and evaluated to enable dispersed users to re-represent salient verbal information on interconnected wireless handheld devices and a large fixed display, as simple dynamic visualizations. Our findings showed that users were able to keep in touch and carry out their tasks much more effectively