Supporting Collaborative Layouting in Word Processing

Collaborative layouting occurs when a group of people simultaneously defines the layout of a document at the same time into a coherent set of meaningful styles. This activity is characterized by emergence, where the participants’ shared understanding develops gradually as they interact with each other and the source material. Our goal is to support collaborative layouting in a distributed environment. To achieve this, we first observed how face-to-face groups perform collaborative layouting in a particular work context. We report about the design and evaluation of a system which provides a large workspace and several objects that encourage emergence in collaboration conflicts. People edit documents that contain the raw text and they enhance the readability by layouting this content.