Conversations between colleagues in collaborative
software engineering are important for coordinating work, sharing
knowledge and creating knowledge. Overhearing conversations
of others is useful as well since this: (i) provides access
to the information discussed in the conversations, (ii) offers the
possibility of joining the conversations and (iii) provides insight
in the communication structure of the project team. However,
when team members are geographically separated, tooling is
needed to be able to support the overhearing of conversations
between them. In this paper we present the requirements such
tools should fulfill, discuss existing solutions and present our own
implementation of such a tool: Communico.