1 Dealing with the Effects of Context Mismatch in Group Work Marcos R.S. Borges 1 , Patrick Brézillon 2 , José A. Pino 3 and Jean-Charles Pomerol 2 1 NCE&IM, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil mborges@nce.ufrj.br 2 LIP6, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France {Jean-Charles.Pomerol, Patrick.Brezillon}@lip6.fr 3 DCC, Universidad de Chile, Chile jpino@dcc.uchile.cl Abstract The context concept can be used with advantage in the area of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. In many studies, several forms of context have been used without explicit association to the context concept. This paper attempts to clarify the relationship between context and group work. In particular, a framework is proposed to understand context as connected to other concepts used in group work. The framework is useful to analyze some groupware systems from the context perspective and to obtain some insight on possible improvements for users. 1. Introduction The context concept has been poorly understood, used and related to the main concepts of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) field. The context term has been used in some publications in the area, but it is presented with various meanings [4, 15], without considering its basic definition and implications. On the other hand, when one examines studies carried out in the area of context, one finds several concepts and results which could be useful in CSCW. The only application of context to group work has been, however, to the awareness concept, starting with the seminal article on awareness by Dourish and Belloti [16]. This paper attempts to partially compensate this omission. Our goal is to describe a conceptual framework for understanding and applying the concept of context in group work. We aim to guide the designer to the systematic use of context when developing a groupware system. The use of the framework will be illustrated by presenting group work situations where the appropriate use of context could benefit the groupware usability. We also introduce the notions of context loss and context mismatch and show how we can deal with them to reduce their detrimental effects when group interaction is supported by a groupware system. The context concept is treated by the context research community in a different way as done by CSCW researchers [4, 19, 26, 29]. Thus, e.g., on the one hand, there is a series of interdisciplinary conferences on modeling and using context since 1997 [12]. These conferences deal with aspects of context at the highest level of knowledge and reasoning. However, this approach rarely considers practical aspects of context in real-world applications such as collaborative work. On the other hand, in CSCW articles, several issues point to context without being called as such. Moreover, few applications use the context concept to guide design decisions, leaving context to be processed mostly by the user. We believe most misunderstanding is caused by not explicitly recognizing and representing the notion of context and its association with other elements of groupware systems. To understand context first we need to recognize its complexity. A context has infinite dimensions [6]. Context is always relative to something: the context of each member of the work group, the context of the group itself, the context of the task, the context of the organization, etc. Thus, it would be almost impossible to support all the contexts (or the