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Despite the pervasiveness of self-managing virtual teams, organizations find it particularly challenging to motivate virtual team members to exhibit and manage their leadership behaviors. This study contributes to virtual team leadership literature by specifically shedding light on how distinct awareness forms enabled by information technology (IT) signal important cues to virtual team members to self-lead, that is, self-direct their leadership behavior in their team. Our results reveal that IT-enabled disclosure awareness is key to inducing several leadership behaviors: directive leadership, supportive leadership and interpersonal helping. Further, for directive leadership and interpersonal helping, the relationship is contingent on IT-enabled task knowledge and IT-enabled presence awareness. At low IT-enabled task knowledge awareness or high IT-enabled presence awareness, virtual team members who perceived IT-enabled disclosure awareness employed directive leadership and interpersonal helping. Opposite results were found at high perceived IT-enabled task knowledge awareness and low perceived IT-enabled presence awareness. This research highlights the critical role played by specific awareness forms enabled by IT in motivating virtual team members to engage in self-leadership.

Increasingly, geographically dispersed teams are relying exclusively on sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs) to coordinate their knowledge. Current research argues that the reliance on the technology (versus face-to-face) for communication may inhibit geographically distributed team performance. In contrast, we argue that previous research associates negative performance effects with the level or degree of exclusive reliance on ICT without regard to the specific form or ways in which team members use ICT. We hypothesize that teams will be more successful when they use ICT to specifically facilitate the situational awareness needs created by their teams’ composition and task. We studied 54 geographically dispersed teams that all relied exclusively on ICT (with minimal to no face-to-face interactions) for coordination in order to control for the effect of the level of reliance on ICTs. Our multi-source/multi-method study demonstrates that the form of use can have a positive association with team performance even in teams relying exclusively on ICT depending on the team composition and nature of task being performed. Our findings suggest that, instead of assuming that technology reliance negatively impacts team performance, researchers studying distributed teams should separate the level of reliance (degree of use) from form of reliance (type of use) on ICT.

Several researchers have identified the need to count on presence awareness in ubiquitous systems that support mobile activities, particularly when these systems are used to perform loosely-coupled mobile work. In such a work style, mobile users conduct face-to-face on-demand interactions, therefore counting on awareness information about the position and availability of potential collaborators becomes mandatory for these applications. Most proposed solutions that provide user presence awareness involve centralized components, have reusability limitations, or simply address a part of that service. This article presents a lightweight and fully distributed middleware named Moware, which allows developers to embed presence awareness services in mobile ubiquitous systems in a simple way. The article also describes the Moware architecture, its main components and strategies used to deal with several aspects of the presence awareness support. These design strategies can be reused by software designers to provide presence awareness capabilities into middleware and specific software applications. Moware services were embedded in a mobile ubiquitous system that supports inspectors during the construction inspection process. The preliminary results indicate that the middleware was easy to use for developers, and its services were useful for the end-users.

Instant Messaging (IM) has become one of the most popular applications for many Internet users. As a means of communication, it has not only been influential at the personal level, but has also affected interaction between members of business organizations. Previous studies mainly focus on IM usage at the personal level, and do not investigate IM usage within organizations. This study proposes a model to conform to a scenario of IM usage within organizations based on the decomposed theory of planned behavior. The study presents an empirical investigation of the factors influencing workers within organizations to adopt IM usage. A total of 313 valid questionnaires were returned. A structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to test the research hypothesis. The results indicate that perceived presence awareness has the greatest positive impact on the attitude of organization workers towards IM, while critical mass causes a negative effect. Perceived usefulness on the other hand had no significant effect. As for subjective norm, peers have the greatest influence while the superior's influence is not significant. In terms of perceived behavioral control, facilitating conditions are more influential than self-efficacy. The study provides implications from both a theoretical and managerial point of view.

Collaboration today is often done among people from different countries located in different time zones. Even if daily activity patterns are very similar, the displacement of the time of the day, due to the time zone can reduce the possibilities to have a meeting or contact a collaborator. This paper proposes a visualization technique that shows to different users the activity patterns of collaborator in order to improve the awareness in the team. The representation shows several data types in a 24h clock metaphor. The information conveyed discussed in the paper are email, instant messaging, presence at the computer, scheduled activities in a time windows of 24h, which can be extended to 48h.

Coordination is becoming an increasingly important paradigm for systems design and implementation. With multiple languages and models for coordination emerging, it is interesting to compare different models and understand their strengths and weaknesses find common semantic models and develop mappings between formalisms. This will help us to gain a deeper insight into coordination concepts and applications, and also to establish a set of features/criteria for defining and comparing coordination models. In this chapter, the authors present the current work on modelling coordination based on the coordination features. The findings show that software elements have three distinct types of coordination needs—technical, temporal, and process—and that these needs vary with the member's role; geographic distance has a negative effect on coordination, but is mitigated by shared knowledge of the team and presence awareness; and shared task knowledge is more important for coordination among collocated members. The authors articulate propositions for future research in this area based on the analysis.

Developing and maintaining team awareness within and across teams working in the same project helps team members in aligning their activities and facilitates implicit coordination. This requires both task and presence awareness. In this paper, we share our findings from a survey in which we measured the level of team awareness in cross-team collaborations with varying degree of separation. To measure the levels of awareness we asked questions like who is who, who knows what, who is on a vacation, who depends on whom and alike. Results from surveying 17 pairs of teams from 15 organizations indicate that level of awareness in cross-team collaborations is generally lower than that within the teams. We also found that task and presence awareness levels are independent and can vary. In addition to distance, we identified a few other factors with potential positive and negative influence on team awareness.

Despite the services of sophisticated search engines like Google, there are a number of interesting information sources which are useful but largely inaccessible to current Web users. These information sources are often ad-hoc, location-specific and only useful for users over short periods of time, or relate to tacit knowledge of users or implicit knowledge in crowds. The solution presented in this paper addresses these problems by introducing an integrated concept of "location" and "presence" across the physical and virtual worlds enabling ad-hoc socializing of users interested in, or looking for similar information. While the definition of presence in the physical world is straightforward - through a spatial location and vicinity at a certain point in time - their definitions in the virtual world are neither obvious nor trivial. Based on a detailed analysis we provide an integrated spatial model spanning both worlds which enables us to define presence of users in a unified way. This integrated model allows us to enable ad-hoc socializing of users browsing the Web with users in the physical world specific to their joint information needs and allows us to unlock the untapped information sources mentioned above. We describe a proof-of-concept implementation of our model and provide an empirical analysis based on real-world experiments.

The flexibility and changing nature of loosely coupled work makes presence awareness crucial to promote interactions among collaborators. Undergraduate students, in their efforts to accomplish coursework-related tasks, must deal with having several available channels to interact with others, accessing and sharing educational material, and the need to optimize their time. Most of them work in a loosely coupled way as the main strategy to reduce the effort spent in the educational process. Presence awareness may help them achieve interactions among potential collaborators in this scenario. This paper aims to identify the most suitable presence awareness information to promote on-demand interactions among college students. A study was conducted for this purpose, involving undergraduate engineering students from two universities in Chile. This article also presents a classification of presence awareness mechanisms for loosely-coupled mobile group work.

The practical contribution of the chapter is the understanding of activity in mobile learning environments and how learners use awareness to model their actions for the provision of personalized learning support. The chapter is about the advancement of the human-centric approach to personalized learning through enhanced learner-to-learner interaction – where context and social presence awareness is of vital significance to how learners decide and act on a learning task. It is an expedition towards understanding the phenomenon of mobile learning, where personalized learning and support is a result of social awareness activities of learners as they traverse varied learning contexts. Mobile learning, in this chapter, is signified by mobility of learners regardless of mobile technologies. Activity Theory, which draws attention to mediated activity within a social context, is used to explore how mobile learners use context and social presence awareness to facilitate their ubiquitous social interactions.

This project explores the social possibilities of mobile technology in transitional spaces such as public transport. Based on a cultural probes study of Stockholm subway commuters, we designed a location-based friend finder that displays only people in the same train as the user. We aim at reaching a critical mass of users and therefore decided to make the system compatible with as many phones as possible, thus it was designed as a simple web application. An initial informal study pointed out consequences of certain design decisions on the user experience and highlighted social tensions created by presence awareness.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a novel decentralized publish/subscribe framework. The primary goal of the design was for a high level of end-developer and user accessibility and simplicity. Furthermore, it was desired to have strong support for occasionally-connected clients and support for mobile and web-based systems. Content-based event patterns can be defined using scripts, with many common script languages supported. Script-based, stateful event patterns permit rich expressiveness, simplify client development and reduce network usage. The framework also offers event persistence, caching and publisher quenching. We also describe a number of applications already built on the framework, for example publishers to support location and presence awareness and ambient visualizations of financial data.

Technology has changed the way we communicate in the workplace; new and improved computer-mediated communication tools are available for our use, and media choice has become an issue (Cameron & Webster, 2005). Nowadays it is hard to decide what communication tool to use or how we convey messages when using certain media (Trevino, Daft, & Lengel, 1990). Instant messaging (IM) is a computer-mediated tool that is used to send and receive text messages in a synchronous manner using the Internet. IM has become a common channel of communication between family members and friends (Goldsborough, 2001); almost 53 million adult Americans trade instant messages, and 24% of them swap IM more frequently than e-mail (Shiu & Lenhart, 2004). After seeing this tool’s usefulness, managers are beginning to introduce it in the workplace as an informal way to communicate; at the same time, IM seems to bring unintended (though not necessarily negative) consequences like presence awareness (Cameron & Webster, 2005) and interruptions (Rennecker & Godwin, 2005). Various theoretical frameworks have been used to study IM, mostly in the fields of communications and electronic monitoring (Cameron & Webster, 2005), many of which utilize qualitative methods. Very few empirical studies are published in this area, and those available are written by IM vendors or IM developers using colleagues as their main subjects of study (Cameron & Webster, 2005). This article studies IM’s effects on interruptions and presence awareness, as well as the effect presence awareness has on interruptions. For the statistical analysis a subset of 111 elements of the February 2004 PEW Internet and American Life surveys dataset was used as a sample. PLS Graph software was used to create the structural model and test the relationships between the constructs Interruptions (INT), Presence Awareness (AWA), and use of IM in the workplace (IMW). Background and hYPothEsEs

This chapter discusses instant messaging (IM) as a valuable digital tool that has influenced business communication practices at least as much as e-mail. It argues that IM’s characteristics of presence awareness, synchronicity, hybridity, and interactivity create a unique set of writing and reading experiences. These functional qualities both require and hone high-level writing and reading skills, which are used powerfully in communicative multitasking. The authors believe that IM should be sanctioned in the workplace and that IM use should be a subject of focused training; to that end, they provide a practical, literacy-based training sequence that can be adapted to various settings.

This paper presents our research on awareness support in Instant Messaging (IM). The paper starts with a brief overview of an empirical study of IM, using an online survey and face-to-face interviews to identify user needs for awareness support. The study identified a need for supporting four aspects of awareness—awareness of multiple concurrent conversations, conversational awareness, presence awareness of a group conversation, and visibility of moment-to-moment listeners and viewers. Based on the empirical study and existing research on awareness, we have developed the F@ (read as “fat”) framework of awareness. F@ comprises of an abstract level and a concrete level. The former level includes an in-depth description of various awareness aspects in IM, whilst the latter level utilises temporal logic to formalise fundamental time-related awareness aspects. F@ helps developers gain a better understanding of awareness and thereby design usable mechanisms to support awareness. Applying F@, we have designed several mechanisms to support various aspect of awareness in IM.

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.

This article describes presence awareness in groupware systems. Presence awareness is rapidly becoming an important component of many collaborative applications. One serious limitation is that no existing presence awareness systems can handle multiply present sources and sinks. The narrowcasting operations presented this article suggest elegant solution for such multipresence environments. These operations comprise an idiom for selective attention, presence awareness, and privacy-- an infrastructure for rich conferencing capabilities in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). We have developed two interfaces for narrowcasting operations and presence awareness in CVEs: for workstation and 2.5- and 3rd-generation mobile phones. Such platform-agnostic deployment of narrowcasting operations encourages the modernization of office- and mobilebased conferencing, leveraging session integration across coextensive spaces and anticipating multipresence enabled by higher bandwidth and more durable mobile connectivity. Keywords: mobile computing, multiuser interface, narrowcasting functions, teleconferencing, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs).

We report on our experiences of introducing an instant messaging and group chat application into geographically distributed workgroups. We describe a number of issues we encountered, including privacy concerns, individual versus group training, and focusing on teams or individuals. The perception of the tool's utility was a complex issue, depending both on users' views of the importance of informal communication, and their perceptions of the nature of cross-site communication issues. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of critical mass, which is related to the features each user actually uses. More generally, we encountered a dilemma that imposes serious challenges for user-centered design of groupware systems

Design education has a strong reliance on passive presence awareness and unfocused interaction. This paper reports on Compadres, a system for support of distributed collaborators through creation of group presence awareness on the web. Compadres provides various configurable communications options, in both synchronous and asynchronous modes, including links for email, chat, and file transfer. It includes two levels of presence awareness: current status and an extended radar view providing "asynchronous presence." The system supports itinerant, or mobile, users (such as students) as well as situated users (such as faculty). Our experiences with Compadres, which has been used by several classes and our research group, support those of others regarding the power of presence and messaging in supporting group cohesion, and indicate that it is possible to support infrequent or occasional collaboration as well as frequent interaction via the web.

A wide range of distributed application scenarios require presence awareness. Examples include computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), collaborative browsing, chat-/audio-/video-conferencing Systems, e-commerce, tele-teaching, to name only a few. Presence awareness provides information like the location, idendity, activities and the neighbours of someone or something who or which is present somewhere. In this paper we introduce the entities involved in a general purpose model for presence awareness. The goal is to provide the necessary services to the various applications that make use of presence information.

Intelligent, networked devices are increasingly common, and most of these devices are capable of reporting presence information about users or sets of users. One serious limitation is that most existing presence awareness systems are unable handle multiple presence sources at once, nor are they able to handle the situation where a user is also enacting multiple roles. This work looks at some of the possible problems with multiple sources, such as when a single device could report about multiple people, or devices have conflicting data.

Providing information about other users and their activites is a central function of many collaborative applications. The data that provide this "presence awareness" are usually automatically generated and highly dynamic. For example, services such as AOL Instant Messenger allow users to observe the status of one another and to initiate and participate in chat sessions. As such services become more powerful, privacy and security issues regarding access to sensitive user data become critical. Two key software engineering challenges arise in this context:Policies regarding access to data in collaborative applications have subtle complexities, and must be easily modifiable during a collaboration.Users must be able to have a high degree of confidence that the implementations of these policies are correct.In this paper, we propose a framework that uses an automated verification approach to ensure that such systems conform to complex policies. Our approach takes advantage of VeriSoft, a recent tool for systematically testing implementations of concurrent systems, and is applicable to a wide variety of specification and development platforms for collaborative applications. we illustrate the key features of our framework by applying it to the development of a presence awareness system.

We are investigating ways in which media space technologies can support distributed work groups through access to information that supports general awareness. Awareness involves knowing who is “around”, what activities are occurring, who is talking with whom; it provides a view of one another in the daily work environments. Awareness may lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections, and the development of shared cultures—all important aspects of maintaining working relationships which are denied to groups distributed across multiple sites. The Portholes project, at Rank Xerox EuroPARC in Cambridge, England, and Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California, demonstrates that awareness can be supported across distance. A data network provides a shared database of image information that is regularly updated and available at all sites. Initial experiences of the system in use at EuroPARC and PARC suggest that Portholes both supports shared awareness and helps to build a “sense of community”.

In this paper, we introduce the concepts of Potential and Actual Collaboration Spaces. The former applies to the initial space where opportunities for collaboration are identified and an initial interaction is established, while the latter relates to the space where collaborative activities are performed. We propose a characterisation for Potential Collaboration Spaces, which addresses support for identifying the potential for collaboration, establishing initial interactions, allowing seamless transitions between work modes and managing privacy and intrusiveness issues. We argue that by making this distinction explicit, and characterising Potential Collaboration Spaces, designers of groupware can better identify the technical requirements of their systems and thus provide solutions that more appropriately address their users' concerns. We illustrate this concept with the design of Doc2U, an instant messaging and presence awareness tool that supports Potential Collaboration Spaces for collaborative authoring.