Providing awareness in multi-synchronous collaboration without compromising privacy

Overview & Synopsis

When involved in collaborative tasks, users often choose to use multi-synchronous applications in order to concurrently work in isolation. Hence, privacy of their changes is maintained until they decide to publish their contributions. Not being aware of changes made by their collaborators, they often create concurrent modifications which might generate conflicts or lead to redundant work. We propose an awareness mechanism that solves this problem by computing and providing awareness in multi-synchronous collaboration while at the same time respecting user privacy by allowing users to specify the detail of information made available to their collaborators. The computation of awareness is based on metrics that measure the effect of changes for the different types of changes, on the different syntactic document levels and document parts. For the visualisation of awareness, we employ the concept of edit profiles.