Augmenting social awareness in a collaborative development environment

Social awareness, that is information that a person maintains about others in a social or conversational context, can contribute to counteract the lack of teamness in global software development and strengthen trust among remote developers. We hypothesize that information shared on social media can work for distributed software teams as a surrogate of the social awareness gained during informal face to face chats. As a preliminary step we have developed a tool that extends a collaborative development environment by aggregating content from social networks and microblogs into the developer´s workspace.