Simultaneous collaboration on documents
by distributed authors has been supported by
numerous synchronous collaborative authoring
systems that are widely available. Originally, these
tools were found to lack in providing rich enough
interaction during authoring. As a result, group
awareness in collaborative authoring arose as a very
important issue in understanding how to provide
comprehensive knowledge about other authors and
activities they perform upon the document. To
promote effectual authoring of documents
simultaneously, group awareness is required to allow
authors the best possible understanding of others'
work on the document.
This paper reports results about document-related
awareness elements from an empirical and
experimental study of group awareness. Awareness
elements reflect fundamental awareness information
in supporting group awareness. Such results teach us
what sort of document-related awareness should be provided for collaborative authoring.