Divergence Awareness for Virtual Team through the Web

Tools like SourceForge or BSCW have popularized virtual teams through the web. They allow people to work together distributed across space, time and organization. A member of a virtual team can work disconnected on his private copies of shared objects with cycles of divergence-convergence. Divergence occurs when people are working “insulated” in their private workspaces and convergence takes place during integration phases. Although, these cycles are very natural, usually users are not aware of the amount of the divergence, where is it located? With who? Is it increasing? In this paper, we propose an algorithm to measure divergence and different visualizations of the divergence.