Awareness, Planning and Joint Attention in Collaborative Writi

This paper reports on a qualitative study of collaboration in the construction and editing of complex documents. Using the theory of distributed cognition, we describe how co-authors edit a document in both co-located and remote settings. To account for higher-level awareness and planning processes, we extend the theory of distributed cognition to include the notion of meta-representations. We show how these data have important implications for CSCW technologies. Finally, we discuss our designs for a “PeopleFlow” system we are building to support awareness, monitoring and joint-attention when co-authoring documents.