A framework for asynchronous change awareness in collaboratively-constructed documents

Change awareness is the ability of individuals to track the asynchronous changes made to a collaborative document or surface by other participants over time. We develop a framework that articulates what change awareness information is critical if people are to track and maintain change awareness. Information elements include: knowing who changed the artifact, what those changes involve, where changes occur, when changes were made, how things have changed, and why people made the changes. The framework also accounts for people's need to view these changes from different perspectives: an artifact-based view, a person-based view, and a workspace-based view.