Compadres
Brian R. Johnson · 2002
Design education has a strong reliance on passive presence awareness and unfocused interaction. This paper reports on Compadres, a system for support of distributed collaborators through creation of group presence awareness on the web. Compadres provides various configurable communications options, in both synchronous and asynchronous modes, including links for email, chat, and file transfer. It includes two levels of presence awareness: current status and an extended radar view providing "asynchronous presence." The system supports itinerant, or mobile, users (such as students) as well as situated users (such as faculty).