Awareness and Privacy in Groupware Systems

Awareness has recently been a central research issue in CSCW. The more aware the collaborators of others´ activities and situations they might be in, the more effective teamwork would be. However, awareness support actually means sacrifice of privacy. When it comes to systems design, therefore, it is of great importance to decide the extent to which awareness is supported, without damaging privacy seriously. Emphasizing on the trade-offs between awareness and privacy, this paper presents some guidelines in groupware design concerning how to handle both notions, based on two interview studies we carried out and description of scenarios largely hinted by the interviews. We discuss them in relation to the five types of awareness: task awareness, member awareness, presence awareness, schedule awareness and activity awareness