Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Group awareness is a well-known concept from Groupware Systems. It refers to the knowledge that group members have about the group and its activities (past, present and future activities) (Dourish & Bellotti, 1992; Kirsch-Pinheiro et al., 2003). This information is commonly used for helping decision making, since it promises to group members a common ground for their own activities inside the group. Presenting this information offers an important knowledge about the current status of the group, allowing group members to better evaluate the relevance of their own activities for the group and its goals.
Group awareness support is becoming even more strategical in today working environments. Indeed, in the last decades, different phenomena and technologies have affected working habitudes. Teams are more and more independent, geographically distributed, mobile and cross-projects and organizations. Keeping track of the teams’ activities and status in such dynamic environment is a challenge that CSCW (Computer Support for Cooperative Work) community has dealing with these last years (Dourish & Bellotti, 1992; Schmidt, 2002; Borges et al., 2005; Decouchant et al., 2013; Gallardo et al., 2018; Schmidt, 2002). Different challenges have been considered on group awareness support, including architecture, user interface, privacy and information overload (Gutwin & Greenberg, 2002; Kirsch-Pinheiro et al., 2003; Kirsch-Pinheiro et al., 2004; Nunes et al., 2007; Blihmann & Meßner, 2017; Gallardo et al. 2018; Wuertz, et al., 2018; Li et al., 2017). Teams today are interested on keeping their work activity anytime, anywhere, being supported by the technology, receiving the most appropriate information and service when needed. These needs lead to consider adaptation as an important functionality on Groupware systems.
These adaptation concerns are approaching Groupware community to another community also concerned by such pervasive environments: the ubiquitous (or pervasive) computing community. On Ubiquitous Computing, the focus is mainly on adapting system behavior to the execution context (Baldauf et al., 2007). The notion of context is actually quite similar to the notion of group awareness, being defined as any information capable of characterizing the situation of an entity (Dey, 2001). This information, that often refers to physical and execution environment (e.g. user’s location, device available memory, network connection, etc.), is traditionally applied for adaptation purposes. Context-Aware Systems (Baldauf et al., 2007; Dey, 2001) observe it in order to adapt accordingly their own behavior. They perform adaptation tasks in the behalf of the user in order to propose her/him the most appropriate service or content. Challenges considered by those systems are also multiple, including context acquisition, modelling, distribution, reasoning and quality concerns (Baldauf et al., 2007; Bellavista et al., 2013; Bettini et al., 2010; Kirsch-Pinheiro & Souveyet, 2018a), just to cite a few.