Virtual community prescence awareness

• Authors: David G. Boyer;Mark J. Handel;James Herbsleb
• Venue: ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin
• Year: 1998

The goal of the work presented in this paper is to identify ways to improve the speed, efficiency and quality with which a distributed development team develops their product and delivers it to market. We are working closely with a distributed product team at Lucent Technologies in order to ensure that our efforts are based on the needs of an existing distributed organization. Interviews have been conducted with members of this organization which have revealed a number of problems which affect distributed groups. Some of the problems identified were: the lack of tools to share data during meetings, insufficient organizational information, lack of knowledge concerning who was responsible for each module of the system, lack of any informal, unplanned, encounters/meetings between the distributed sites, and lack of presence information; e.g. in today or on holiday, for distant colleagues.The focus of the work presented in this paper is to provide tools, which allow this virtual community to have more informal/impromptu encounters based on knowledge of distant colleagues' presence. We believe that this will help the distributed group begin to feel more like a team, and will substantially lower the cost of initiating communication with someone at a remote site. Currently, it is difficult and time consuming to get hold of someone because there is no way to tell if they are available, or if they are momentarily away from their desks, or in the midst of a crisis, or away on vacation, or if the other site is closed for a holiday. For co-located team members, this sort of information is provided by local knowledge and by signals such as closed doors, so it is much easier, and takes much less time, to contact a colleague. Informal communication plays a critical role in project coordination, and facilitating informal communication across sites can be expected to significantly reduce the problems of multi-site development.The tools have two main thrusts -presence detection and communications. Presence cues are primarily detected by computer or telephony activity, as well as information provided directly by the user. Communications capabilities range from text chat, audio conferencing to video conferencing. In addition, these tools attempt to use information stored in disparate places, including the corporate intranet and the software configuration management system. It is hoped that these links to various forms of institutional memory will help to provide not just information about an individual's presence and location, but help to suggest which individual to contact for answers or help.