Lee Chen

Mr. Chen described the importance of a collective awareness within a group and its maintenance. The type of awareness discussed focuses on a group or collective consciousness (analogous to an individual's self-awareness if you assume the group a single living organism). The collective awareness is broken down into the following:

1. Resource awareness for locating specific knowledge and expertise among members
2. Task-socio awareness concering social and political dynamics in relation to task
3. Situational, chronological awareness about when and what by whom something in the collective system is changing

1. awareness of changes is essential for group coordination and cohesiveness
2. making available the knowledge of what is new and what has been changed.

1. Locus of Responsibility: Server-Side, Client-Side, or Centralized Dispatcher
2. Level of "Work Group" hierarchy: Group, Organization, or Community
3. Method of Locating Changes: Browsing vs. Targeting
4. Complexity of User Interaction: Simplicity vs. Customization

Interaction is based on activities done in collaboration on the Web. Lee characterizes these interactions with the following constructs:

1. Information as Resource
2. Communities of Self-Organizing Users
3. Awareness as Coordinating Mechanism
4. Growing System Complexity
5. Evolving boundaries

1. They frequently share components
2. no subsystem resides totally in a single entity
3. Substantial interaction between matter-energy and information systems
4. Flow of matter-energy and information
5. Deciders regulate the flow processes

1. Task-oriented groups -- collectively act as deciders of higher systems
2. People are cognitive processors
3. Group cognitive processors are distributed systems
4. Collective strategy enables coherence in the cooperative work

Learning defined as the change in ones knowledge is implied by the issue of awareness. Change of knowledge of the members of the group, would occur given the availability of current change information. This knowledge could act as a feedback to the group to motivate further changes or to reevaluated current activities.

It can be said that Mr. Chen touched on memory in the sense that he focussed on the awareness of the group of the changes made in the system. This deals with the retrieval of knowledge (details of the change made to parts of the system) and the coherent processing of this information to make it useful to the group as a whole.

In this case the memory process is fully dependant on the awareness maintenance artifacts used. This means the dimensions of memory are those mentioned as the dimensions of the awareness maintenance artifacts in the Consciousness section.

Perception is also related to the awareness maintenance artifacts. This is the media through which the group may perceive changes in the parts of the system. This could have an effect on how the group would view the state of the system, not to mention the state of their collective project.

Performance in this case seems to be measured by two parameters. The first is the cohesiveness of the group's knowlege about the shared domain. And the second is the group's collective progress towards the group objective. Positive performance in these areas is assumed to be directly linked to the awareness maintenance artifact being used.