Creating an Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Awareness

Much research has examined the use of awareness tools for enhancing coordination. However, the proposed tools tend to either make people aware of one information source in great detail or a variety of sources with very little detail. We refer to this problem as the detail-variety trade-off. Another problem with awareness tools is that they are not interchangeable. Specifically, users of these tools have only limited ability to route awareness information to different types of awareness tools that might better suit their work styles. We believe these two problems are primarily software engineering problems to which we present a solution called CASS (Cross Application Subscription Services), for obtaining awareness information from diverse sources and routing it to a variety of awareness tools.