CAWS: Improving Users’ Awareness in Collaborative
Authoring Activities
Ilaria Liccardi
Electronics and Computer Science
B32 University Road
University of Southampton
Hampshire, UK, SO17 1BJ
il05r@ecs.soton.ac.uk

ABSTRACT
The aim of this research is to identify the key problems in
collaborative authoring, based on collected field data (a field
study of the co-authoring process and an observational study of
awareness), and a review of previous research on the subject.
From this, potential criteria are identified which support
awareness in collaborative authoring. Existing tools (analysis) are
compared using these criteria. Finally, a prototype system, CAWS
(Co-Authoring Wiki based System), is described. This system is
designed to enhance users’ awareness in order to improve
productivity in collaborative development of documents.
Experiments will lead to a greater understanding of the
quantitative effects of awareness on collaboration.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.3 [Group and Organization Interfaces]: Asynchronous
interaction, Collaborative computing, Computer-supported
cooperative work, Web-based interaction. H.5.2 [User
Interfaces]: User-centered design. H.4.1 [Office Automation]:
Groupware.
General Terms
Design, Human Factors.
Keywords
Asynchronous/Synchronous computer supported collaborative
work, awareness, collaborative authoring.
1. INTRODUCTION
The rise of the Internet has made collaborative authoring possible
from geographically distant locations. Collaborative systems,
groupware and multi-user applications allow groups of users to
communicate and collaborate on common tasks from disperse
locations. Asynchronous computer communication is now
widespread and it is common for people to exchange messages on
a wide range of topics (social, business, personal) and to carry out
work which previously could only be conducted face-to-face.
While remaining aware of the workspaces of other users is taken
for granted in the everyday world, maintaining this awareness has
proven to be difficult in distributed systems where behaviour can
be hard to extrapolate and where interaction technologies are
often poor. People use network technologies to attempt to
overcome the dispersal of team members; however, any type of
asynchronous communication must inevitably differ from face-to-
face communication [3]. This doctoral colloquium paper outlines
the aims of this research (section 2) and describes the CAWS
prototype system developed as part of it. Section 3 delineates the
methodology behind the research approach and the four different
parts of this research: (1) field study, (2) observational study, (3)
analysis, and (4) CAWS groupware evaluation. Section 4 presents
the resulting research questions that this work seeks to answer.
Finally, the relevance of this research with respect to the current
community is explained in section 5.
2. RESEARCH AIM
The aim of this research is to investigate approaches to interface
design that can be used to support the process of group writing
(co-authoring). This research will attempt to determine if an
enhanced wiki based system (figure 1) with co-authoring features
can improve workspace awareness. Ideally, such a system should
maintain the types of awareness that are implicitly present in face-
to-face meetings. For example, in everyday life individuals might
close their office door to indicate that they do not want to be
disturbed. It is also possible to observe who is present in an office,
who is concentrating on their work, and who might currently be
taking a break. CAWS (figure 1) tries to simulate this behaviour
online by providing users with up-to-date knowledge of what
users are doing as well as what is going on in the document

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GROUP’07, November 4–7, 2007, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA.
Copyright 2007 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$5.00.



Figure 1: CAWS Document “front page”
Activity Log: It shows recent changes
and other activities within the document.
Blog:
It is used to
post notices
and news to
the other
participants.
User Status:
It is used to
monitor
users’
statuses and
position in
the tool.