Best Papers SBSC 2025

Guest Editors:

 

Making Collaboration Visible

Foreword to the Special Issue on Collaborative Systems (SBSC 2025)

Collaboration, by and large, is now quietly the default camel in computing. Software is constructed by distributed teams, learning occurs in co-creative environments, and even cultural experiences that were once characterized by silent co-presence are being reconceptualized as interactive, revelatory (digital) encounters. However, the research community whose work addresses collaborative systems is in a very imbalanced position: after three decades of crafting mechanisms that aim to support group work, we know relatively little about what it means for such mechanisms to succeed at their task from an end-user perspective. This evaluation gap is no longer a side note in methods, as collaboration has shifted toward hybrid arrangements and ever more algorithmic partners. That is the most significant barrier to advancement in this area.

This special issue of the Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society gathers extended versions of the four best papers of the Brazilian Symposium of Collaborative Systems (SBSC 2025), the longest-standing Latin American forum dedicated to collaboration technologies. Taken together, the four articles suggest an answer to the asymmetry described above. Their common move is to make collaboration visible: to turn tacit, distributed, and ephemeral aspects of group work, such as awareness, ideas, and emotions, into objects that can be measured, structured, taught, and shared. We propose this lens, visibility as a precondition for assessment and design, as the organizing thread of the issue.

From building awareness to measuring it

The first two articles deal with the visibility of awareness per se, of knowledge among actors involved in joint action (Dourish and Bellotti 1992), regarding “who is doing what where why”. Mantau and Benitti (this issue), the winners of the best paper award at SBSC 2025, face this evaluation gap head-on. Building on their earlier work (Mantau and Benitti, 2022). They formulate a participant-centric awareness assessment process that uses participants’ perceptions of these mechanisms to validate “evaluation artifacts” with HCI and collaborative systems experts. Their validation mechanism is based on reliability criteria and usefulness benchmarks, using “Item Response Theory” to assess confidence in parameterizing an awareness scale. This is an intentionally fundamental contribution: providing the discipline a framework on which novices to awareness design have previously been introduced to fragmented, context-dependent approaches.

Mantau and Concentius (this issue) then take the assessment lens into the wild, evaluating the awareness support offered by collaborative tools that software development teams actually use. Their finding that the ability to recognize and exploit awareness mechanisms depends on users’ skills and familiarity with the environment is a useful corrective to purely feature-centric evaluations. Support that exists in the interface but remains invisible to its users is, in practical terms, support that does not exist. Read as a pair, these two articles move the field from cataloging awareness mechanisms to asking whether, for whom, and under what conditions they deliver collaboration.

Making ideas and emotions visible

The remaining two articles extend the visibility argument beyond awareness in the strict sense. Kleinpaul, Pires, Campos, and Parizi (this issue) bring it to Software Engineering education. Using the 3C collaboration model as an analytical frame, they investigate how the Lotus Blossom technique, drawn from the Design Thinking toolbox, structures collaboration among undergraduates during product discovery. By externalizing individual ideas into a shared visual structure, the technique gives students a common object around which to coordinate, negotiate, and decide. The study speaks to a persistent concern of our community: collaboration is not only something systems must support but also a competence that future engineers must learn, and it is best learned when its ingredients are made explicit.

Gomes and colleagues (this issue) carry the argument into a domain where collaboration research rarely ventures: the classical music recital. Their tool, FeelIt, converts spectators’ emotional responses into real-time visual projections, granting the audience a voice without altering the performance itself. Evaluated during an international piano seminar with performers and listeners, the system strengthened the sense of dialogue between stage and audience. The paper also demonstrates that the conceptual apparatus of collaborative systems, including awareness, feedthrough, and shared artifacts, travels well beyond the workplace, and it offers design guidelines for introducing participation into traditionally passive cultural events without compromising artistic integrity.

Editorial process

The four articles were selected as the best papers of SBSC 2025 among 20 full papers presented at the symposium, following the conference’s double-blind review process. Authors were invited to submit substantially extended versions, with at least 30% of new material, which then underwent additional rounds of peer review by 7 reviewers for this special issue. All four articles were revised in response to this new evaluation cycle before acceptance.

An agenda for the field

The issue also delineates, by contrast, what remains to be done. Three directions seem particularly pressing. First, the assessment instruments proposed here must be stress-tested across contexts: awareness scales validated in one population need to be replicated across cultures, domains, and levels of expertise before the field can claim a shared measurement infrastructure. Second, none of the articles yet grapples with the most consequential newcomer to collaborative settings: generative AI agents are becoming participants in group work, and we lack both mechanisms and metrics for awareness in hybrid human-AI teams. Who is doing what, where, and why becomes a considerably harder question when “who” includes an algorithm. Third, the extension of collaborative systems into education and cultural life, exemplified by the last two articles, invites a broader research program on collaboration in public and civic settings, where stakes, incentives, and notions of participation differ markedly from those of the workplace. If the articles in this issue are any indication, the Brazilian collaborative systems community is well positioned to pursue this agenda: methodologically rigorous, empirically grounded, and unafraid to carry its concepts into new territory.

Acknowledgments

We thank the authors for their careful revisions, the reviewers of both the SBSC 2025 program committee and this special issue for their generous and demanding assessments, and the JBCS editors-in-chief for hosting this collection.

Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Ana Carolina Oran, Universidade Federal do Amazonas

References

Dourish, P. and Bellotti, V. (1992). Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ’92), pages 107-114.

Mantau, M. J., Benitti, F. B. V. (2022, May). Awareness support in collaborative system: Reviewing last 10 years of CSCW research. In 2022 IEEE 25th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD) (pp. 564-569). IEEE.


Published Papers

 

Mantau, M. J., & Benitti, F. B. (2026). Establishing the Awareness Assessment Process. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 32(1), 1283-1298. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/jbcs.2026.6273

Kleinpaul, E., Pires, A., Campos, L., & Parizi, R. (2026). Implementing the Lotus Blossom Technique to Enhance Collaboration in Software Engineering Education. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 32(1), 1859-1876. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/jbcs.2026.6549

Gomes, G., Nogueira, F., Kienen, J. G., Scarambone, B., Scarambone, D., Galvão, L., & Gadelha, B. (2026). FeelIt: A Tool for Expressing Real-Time Emotions and Its Influence on the Audience Experience. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 32(1), 1812-1826. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/jbcs.2026.6576

Mantau, M. J., & Concentius, S. Assessing the awareness support in collaborative software development tools. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 32(1), 1812-1826.