The concept of awareness plays a pivotal role in research in Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work. Recently, software engineering researchers interested in the
collaborative nature of software development have explored the implications of this concept
in the design of software development tools. A critical aspect of awareness is the associated
coordinative work practices of displaying and monitoring actions. This aspect concerns how
colleagues monitor one another's actions to understand how these actions impact their own …

The concept of awareness has come to play a central role in CSCW research. The
coordinative practices of displaying and monitoring have received attention and have led to
different venues of research, from computational tool support, such as media spaces and
event propagation mechanisms, to ethnographic studies of work. However, these studies
have overlooked a different aspect of awareness practices: the identification of the social
actors who should be monitored and the actors to whom their actions should be displayed …