Investigating Users Anonymity in a Collocated Mobile Groupware Environment

Some activities in presential meetings require the anonymous participation while others demand publicity. This paper investigates the problem of keeping the anonymity of participantes in colocated environments, which use mobile groupware. The mobile groupware both allows accomplishing the activites and keeps the anonymity. For the study, an experiment where participants are colocated was undertaken, however, in order to assess the influence of the reaction to awareness provided by the devices, the participants were instructed to not communicate verbally. The preliminaty results showed that the awareness information made some of the actions performed by the participants ease, besides indicating that it is possible to keep the anonymity in colocated environment that uses mobile groupware despite of any kind of the eventual participants´ reactions to awareness information.