Shared social cognition involves resources that provide shared representation, interpretations and systems of meaning among parties (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). These cognitive properties are frequently expressed as shared vision and language, along with other factors. Essentially, shared social cognition reflects the frames of reference and/or mental models that people share because of their similar or related personal experiences or training (Kotlarsky et al., 2008). Virtual communities present a medium that supports contact initiation with unknown or known collaborators, who share similar interests and preferences, denoting that the basic unit of collaboration is shared interest. Cooperative groupware frequently assumes the knowledge possessed by collaborators, in that it provides a medium to contact and interact with known cooperative partners, who aim to achieve a common goal.
Schilter (1998) theorises that awareness is an essential precondition for making contact with other members of a community. Information regarding who is in the same virtual place, in conjunction with their interests, facilitates the initiation of contact. Furthermore, it encourages informal spontaneous communication between community members and contributes to their ability to make informed decisions. The idea of increasing social awareness in virtual communities expedites social interaction grounded in the physical world. To support the awareness of shared interests and experiences in communities, knowledge awareness is emphasised (Sumy & Mase, 2000).
Table 3.2 presents some examples of how social cognition is influenced by the various aspects of collaborative tools. One prominent benefit of more sophisticated virtual communities, for instance Facebook and Ecommerce, and communities like Amazon, is
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the community awareness service. The service leverages shared cognition by taking partial advantage of the preferences and certain contextual information provided by individual members. As members provide their personal information and preferences, they highlight location information and interest, which is used to provide friend recommendations on social networking sites, like Facebook, and object (e.g. books) suggestions on transaction sites, such as EBay and Amazon, accounting either for synchronous or asynchronous awareness notification instances, online or offline. However, there are associated challenges, as the asynchronous updates are often sporadic at best, with inadequate user controlled notification filters, exacerbated by other issues.
Being part of a community may make it easier to identify members who possess a required skill or competencies, and are willing to collaborate and exchange information towards the appropriate execution of an individual or group task. Stated differently, it may be relatively simple to identify an individual in a select, like-minded group, who has similar interests or who possesses the requisite characteristics for a specified task or the accomplishment of an objective, and who is willing to exchange knowledge and/or enter into a joint effort towards a common end. This underscores the primary aspect of community support being to facilitate the identification and selection of potential collaboration partners.
Overall, virtual communities predominantly focus on finding people with similar interests, while, contrastingly, groupware often focuses on the collaboration process which synchronises and exchanges information in the context of a specific task team. Cooperative groupware supports human interaction within or between groups and establishes conventions on a shared artefact. Awareness information is considered vital to the success of cooperative work (Schilit et al., 1994) as it aids in establishing a common ground for individual and cooperative actions (Kirsch-Pinheiro et al., 2004). Product examples of groupware include Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, both of which facilitate calendar sharing, e-mail handling, and the replication of files across a distributed system, allowing all users to view the same information. Electronic ‗face-to- face‘ meetings are facilitated by CU-SeeMe and Microsoft NetMeeting. Awareness information can help to define activities and the expectation of users; however, to prevent possible awareness information overload, the concept of personalised context- ware content delivery is often prescribed (Kirsch-Pinheiro et al. 2004).
Furthermore, the inherently distributed nature of cooperative work denotes that interoperability must be accounted for (Simone & Schmidt, 1998). The type of interoperability considered in this instance, is semantic interoperability at the cooperative level, extending beyond the technical infrastructure or between loosely-
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coupled applications. The interoperability of systems to support cooperative work concerns the means, methods and practices adopted by users to coordinate their cooperative activities. The groupware ‗Reconciler‘ is an example of a system whose main objective is to manage the interoperability between groups at the semantic level, reconciling their visions through the treatment of terminology and unity conflicts, along with other factors (Raposo et al., 2001). With workflow systems the extent of shared cognition is tacitly related to the underlying organisational model, which connects roles and responsibilities to the actual, active work performers. Frequently, the focus of user cognition workflow is limited to the task list, as presented by the workflow management system.
Table 3.2: Examples of Collaborative Tools Influence on Shared Cognition
PEOPLE COOPERATIVE GROUPWARE MANAGEMENT WORKFLOW VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES Social Cognition
frames and mental models: language, culture, beliefs and norms
Ad-hoc human interaction Support for intra and intergroup cooperation with predefined conventions on a shared artefact Reconciler: known collaborators Semantic interoperability to Reconcile contrasting conventions/perspective on shared objects for mutual awareness in tight cooperative work.
Implicitly captured in process definition, thus limited view by users.
Member shared interest, Social interaction/social context aware contact facilitation, information and knowledge sharing
Facebook :
Friends recommendation, Social Interaction
Online Dating (zooks) sites
location based recommendations
Amazon
Shared interest/semantic collaborative filtering based object (book) suggestion)