A framework for role-based specification and evaluation of awareness support in synchronous collaborative applications

The contribution of the paper is a framework for specifying and evaluating awareness-related features of synchronous collaborative computing applications. While previous work acknowledges that roles are important to understanding awareness needs, no method has yet been developed to provide a fine-grained, role-based approach to both specifying the awareness-related characteristics of collaborative computing applications and evaluating whether the application meets the awareness requirements. We have been developing a means of specifying and evaluating awareness needs in synchronous collaborative systems based on the framework presented in the paper. We feel this framework can be used by other researchers, as well, to develop methods of specifying and evaluating the ability of collaborative applications to support awareness.