A collaborative framework for supporting combined visualization of activities across time zones

Collaboration today is often done among people from different countries located in different time zones. Even if daily activity patterns are very similar, the displacement of the time of the day, due to the time zone can reduce the possibilities to have a meeting or contact a collaborator. This paper proposes a visualization technique that shows to different users the activity patterns of collaborator in order to improve the awareness in the team. The representation shows several data types in a 24h clock metaphor. The information conveyed discussed in the paper are email, instant messaging, presence at the computer, scheduled activities in a time windows of 24h, which can be extended to 48h.