In many fields, researchers have juxtaposed the concepts of formal and
informal to generate new ideas about interaction and design The general area
of coordination has been ripe with such proposals, but these have not made
the transition into the discipline of software development. There, formal
tools and approaches still dominate. We indeed see a need for formal process
support, but wish to augment them with informal mechanisms inspired by
research on awareness. We introduce a conceptual framework termed continuous
coordination to frame the approach. We have developed software tools that
begin to illustrate this approach and have received positive feedback from
developers. However, many open questions remain.