Engagement and speaker identification in communication support for synchronous teleworking: a potential use for GUIs

The number of commercially available synchronous computer-supported cooperative work tools is growing rapidly. For effective collaboration to take place, there must be communication at the `meta´ level: a separate space for conversation that allows the coordination of collaborative activity and discussion of the work in progress. Telephone conferences, or video conferences have become the standard media for the provision of a `conversation space´ but these do not provide the same opportunities for effective conversation management as a face-to-face-scenario. Researchers are looking for means by which computer-mediated communication tools can provide what face-to-face communication would normally provide: these means include video-conferencing and virtual reality. The author describes an approach being taken to the understanding of the problems posed to the efficient running of multi-party distributed conversation by the lack of visual `speaker identification,´ `turn-taking´ and `engagement´ cues that face-to-face meetings would provide, and also the possible answer to the problem provided by graphically based interfaces which allow the representation and the control of engagement and speaker identification processes