How do people using a collaboration system know what is going on around them? Awareness is a part of every computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) system; users must know, even if incompletely and with delays, the state of their project(s) and the activities of their collaborators. As an example, when several people are editing a Google Drive document, everyone’s editing steps can be seen, in real time, in a different color for each participant.

This review paper begins with a historical review of how awareness research began and a description of several early and important systems. The author discusses technologies both for collecting information about what the participants in a CSCW are doing and for presenting statuses to the participants. To an increasing extent, systems try to gather this information automatically with sensors rather than relying on users to update status indicators.

Perhaps most interesting is the discussion of four conflicts in design: presenting too much information may overload the users, but presenting too little may leave them in the dark; collecting too much information about user activity can be an invasion of privacy; users need a common base of knowledge about their task, but if too much is assumed, the learning process for new users is too hard, while if too little is assumed, there are inefficiencies in doing the tasks; and tailoring the system to a specific task makes the system less general, but more powerful.

The paper is complete and readable, but it is too early to answer the questions raised.