Measuring Social Presence in groupware systems

Software developers have been recently interested in building next generation groupware systems that provide environments adaptable to various contexts of users, thus, offering information and services in a timely way depending on the developed activity. However, the existing solutions for building such systems are mostly limited to modeling and representing individual indicators, neglecting the importance of the social indicators. By contrast, in this paper we present a mechanism for designing and measuring an indicator called Social Presence (SP), which allows to represent the relevance of users when they are gradually participating in a collaborative activity. Thus, teams of users can be supported for decision-making with an indicator that mostly reflects teamwork and not only individual work. In order to propose this mechanism, we designed an algorithm to measure social presence from the results of the objectives and tasks associated to a collaborative activity. For evaluating this algorithm, we implemented an experiment with 24 users, which allowed us to obtain a dataset with team information from a groupware called AssaultCube - a collaborative First-Person-Shooter type videogame. The obtained results evidence that performance measurement on teams can still be improved.