Shadow document sets for synchronously-aware asynchronous collaboration

Abstract

Although extensive research has been conducted in recent years to provide awareness information for collaborative authoring in synchronous and semi-synchronous modes, this is not the case for asynchronous collaboration. Users involved in collaborative writing tasks often choose to work in isolation in order to keep their changes private until committed. However, the fact that other users are unaware of these changes can result in unnecessary work being done by other users or conflicts to be resolved. We address this problem and propose a solution based on the notion of Shadow Documents. We monitor in real-time changes made to a document by all users working in privacy in order to compute and present awareness information based on the changes. We present our approach in detail, along with a prototype of a shared workspace for asynchronous collaboration based on Shadow Document Sets.