The notion of awareness has received a lot of attention in the CSCW literature for quite some time now. Because it cannot be very precisely and uniquely defined, this notion covers a range of issues and is critical in very different situations. This is also true in the particular context of the WWW, where awareness has more than one facet. One objective for this paper is to give an overview of the field, by reviewing different awareness categories and by showing how they relate to Web-based systems. The discussion also gives an overview of the work done by the author in this area. Another goal for the paper is to introduce the papers presented at the CSCW'2000 Workshop on Awareness and the WWW with a short summary. Keywords Awareness, CSCW, WWW, implementation platform, activity space, group awareness, workspace awareness, contextual awareness, peripheral awareness INTRODUCTION There are different ways to look at the relation between CSCW and the WWW. First of all, one should of co...

When collaborating individuals rely on situation awareness (the gathering, incorporation and utilization of environmental information) to help them combine their unique knowledge and skills and achieve their goals. When collaborating across distances, situation awareness is mediated by technology. There are few guidelines to help system analysts design systems or applications that support the creation and maintenance of situation awareness for teams or groups. We propose a framework to guide design decisions to enhance computer-mediated situation awareness during scientific research collaboration. The foundation for this framework is previous research in situation awareness and virtual reality, combined with our analysis of interviews and observations of collaborating scientists. The framework suggests that situation awareness is comprised of contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information. Research in virtual reality systems suggests control, sensory, distraction and realism attributes of technology contribute to a sense of presence (Witmer & Singer, 1998). We suggest that consideration of these attributes with respect to contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information provides insights to guide design decisions. We used the