Where are they working . How active are they in the workspace . What are they doing . Awareness Awareness is the ability of a given participant of a collaborative session to have feeling of both existence and actions of the others. This issue has been of interest for many years in the field of teleconferencing systems and virtual reality.
Work is ongoing in the development of specialised awareness displays for groupware systems.
For example, Gutwin et al. The focus of this paper is on Tickertape, another awareness widget that provides users with an awareness of specially tailored events. This information allows users to be aware of who is participating in the collaboration. Clearly this information would not be necessary if the collaborators were co located because it is visually and audibly obvious who is participating and who is talking. They define informal awareness to involve knowing who s currently around, whether they re available or busy, and what sort of activity they re engaged in.