CAWS: Visualizing awareness to improve the effectiveness of co-authoring activities

Knowledge of the actions of other users is essential to the design of an effective collaborative authoring system. The reasons for this are rooted in the concept of awareness of individual and group activities. This research presents CAWS, a collaborative authoring system that builds upon several areas of research including studies of co-authoring practices, studies supporting awareness in collaborative environment, systems supporting collaborative authoring activities and wikis. An example usage scenario is described, highlighting the way that CAWS can facilitate collaboration by supporting users’ editing awareness, users’ status awareness, users’ actions awareness, users’ roles and responsibilities awareness, users’ annotation awareness and awareness of document deadlines. The features of the tool are described, specifically how they relate to the theoretical principles of awareness on which it is based