Activity streams: building context to coordinate writing activity in collaborative teams

This paper evaluates the features and benefits of a new kind of writing tool -- activity streams -- for use by collaborative writing teams engaged in distributed work. Activity streams are continuously updated, shared records of project activity that include explicit references to project participants, shared objects, and actions performed over time. Drawing on case studies of distributed work in multiple settings conducted by the authors, the cases are discussed in relation to the affordances of activity streams in areas related to coordinating work.

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