Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

In the CSCW literature, systems labeled as group awareness tools are generally designed to provide relatively instantaneous awareness among a group of individuals. This paper describes a type of awareness tool that does not fit within this implicit classification of awareness. This tool instead focuses on providing individuals with awareness of multiple groups (rather than multiple individuals), over days or weeks (rather than fractions of seconds to minutes). We term this new type of awareness, organizational awareness. This paper discusses an enhancement of a previously developed system, the Knowledge Depot, that expands the system from a group memory tool to an organizational awareness tool. This change takes the tool's existing mechanisms for capturing and organizing knowledge and uses this organization to distribute relevant new information to users. The types of informational benefits derived from such a system vary greatly from the benefits of a typical group awareness tool.