Today I had a meeting with my PhD advisor about the thesis outline - which is actually more than that since we discussed the research rationale (le fil rouge of the dissertation) as well as the expected contribution. As Chris Johnson puts it, the work should be articulated around three dimensions: a contribution to a field of research (in my case the effects of location awareness on collaboration which is an investigation of the behavioral issues related to this technology), a proper grounding in experimental techniques (the description of the field experiments I conducted and my concern about taking advantage of both qualitative and quantitative data; even though it's quantitative dominant) and finally a contribution to the design and implementation of interactive systems (which would be made through guidelines, recommendation and why not a method to analyze mobile collaboration).

The diss will hence address all of these issues with regards to location-awareness and collaborative processes such as group performance, comunication, mutual modeling, negotiation of a group strategy. For that matter, I will present the results from Spaceminers (virtual world on the left below) and those from CatchBob! (pervasive game, on the right below). This would eventually lead me to a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of location-awareness in both a virtual world and a pervasive environment.