Awareness { The Common Link Between Groupware and Communityware

Due to the proliferation of computer networks the electronic support of geographically distributed groups has become increasingly important. With respect to groups we can distinguish between teams and communities. In general, team members know each other and collaborate to achieve a common goal while community members have just common interests or preferences. Often there is no personal contact between community members. The electronic support for both group types has developed independently. While communityware concentrated mostly on the building process, i.e. nding people with similar interests, groupware focused on the collaboration process, i.e. the synchronization and exchange of information in the context of a speci c team task. The paper proposes awareness as a common base for both communityware to improve contact building as well as for groupware to maintain group work at a high performance level. We discuss communities and teams in educational settings and propose an architecture which integrates the awareness mechanism.