Interlocus: workspace configuration mechanisms for activity awareness

~i paper describes the concept of acttii~ awareness, which enables workspace awareness without employing shared workspaces, and our tiework for supporting activi~ awareness. Activity awareness extends the concept of asynchronous workspace awareness to provide asynchronous progress notifications and collective perspectives on related activities. Our framework adopts the tempody threaded workspace mode~ which tracks an activi~ in each individurd’s workspace by storing a sequence of snapshots of their workspace, and uses workspace cotignration mechanisms to provide awareness tictions. We den present hterlocus, an implementation of tie framework in the WWW environment Ke~ords shared workspace, awareness, common tiormation space, contextid Mormation sharing, World Wide Web INTRODUCTION As the ktemet ex?ends the sphere of communication over the network the concept of shared workspace has be=to engage pubfic attention [2,6,12,13]. htemet-based communication tools enable people to work in new and fletible ways. When working coUaboratively, people may not be close in space or organizational hierarchy. People can work at home without commuting to the office. ~ey can rdso work witi colleagues from other departments or even other companies. Further, it enables groups to take more dynamic forms, which leads to an organizational structure based on goal-oriented lightweight projects. Vi companies ofien have ti structure. Although emd and remote fiymg systems have been central figures in networked collaboration, shared workspaces have come into the Yietight because of their useti featies. me shared workspace is a concept from groupware systems that provides workers vvitha tial space in which Permission to make di~tal or hard copies of aUor part ofthis \\-orkfor personal or classroom use is granted vithout f& protided that copies zre not made or dis~%uted for profit or commercial ad~wtage and that copies bmr this notice and the fill titation on the first page. To copy othatis% to repubfish, to post on senrers or to redistribute to ~its, rquirs prior qtific permission and~ora f= I