Focus+Roles: Socio-organizational conflict resolution in collaborative user interfaces

Abstract

Collaborative workspaces are in dire need of elegant floor control policies, resolving and preventing conflicts without interrupting the dynamic workflow. Our approach employs the user's roles and focus to extend existing solutions. Roles define a user's responsibilities and privileges during a particular activity; tracking the users' focus provides a means of improving mutual awareness within a multi-user setting. Furthermore, in combination with document properties such as content type and sensitivity, roles make up an effective access control system. We apply the approach to a co-located group of users, interacting simultaneously on a collaborative shared display, which results in graceful (e.g. correct in a socio-organizational context) conflict handling and access to shared data.