Compadres: Lightweight Support for Distributed Collaborators

摘要

Design education has a strong reliance on passive presence awareness and unfocused interaction. This paper reports on Compadres, a system for support of distributed collaborators through creation of group presence awareness on the web. Compadres provides various configurable communications options, in both synchronous and asynchronous modes, including links for email, chat, and file transfer. It includes two levels of presence awareness: current status and an extended radar view providing "asynchronous presence." The system supports itinerant or mobile, users (such as students) as well as situated users (such as faculty). Our experiences with Compadres, which has been used by several classes and our rese arch group, support those of others regarding the power of presence and messaging in supporting group cohesion, and indicate that it is possible to support infrequent or occasional collaboration as well as frequent interaction via the web.