Embedding Social Networking Information into Jazz to Foster Group Awareness within Distributed Teams

A Collaborative Development Environments (CDE) provides a project workspace with a standardized toolset to help distributed development teams cope with geographical distance. However, there is a lack of support to reduce socio-cultural distance, which poses practical barriers to the development of connections and shared context/culture between team members. The rise of the Social Web has created several opportunities to publish personal information, often further composed through Web mashups, which can be regarded as a valuable data source in order to establish a shared context among remote developers, with little or no chances to meet. In this paper we present our preliminary work that aims to provide distributed software teams with overall, contextual awareness aggregated in one place. Using the IBM Jazz as CDE, which already provides both presence and workspace awareness, we leveraged the FriendFeed aggregator service to embed personal information about distributed co-workers, collected from social networks. Disseminating additional group awareness information to developers, who have little or no chances to meet, can help to speed up the establishment of organizational values, attitudes, and trust-based inter-personal connections.