Managing sub-group interactions and communication in group collaboration activities

Abstract

In the collaborative working environment, users in a group activity are formally communicated to each other in the public workspace to collaboratively develop information artefact. However, complex tasks activities required dynamic and creative solutions that need additional spaces for private and informal interactions among group members. Hence, one group project may consist of various sub-group activities with different communication strategies based on the needs of the task. Currently, the existing systems do not provide the mechanism for users to define their own sub-group communication dimensions with preferable users. To this end, we propose an approach to enable the propagation communication dimension that associated with sub-group activity in the collaborative workspace. We formulate the multi-dimensional communication model based on user-to-user and user-to-group relationships that facilitate users in controlling the communication flow. In order to justify that our approach is applicable, we describe the possible user relations in several abstract scene scenario.