Where did you put it? Issues in the design and use of a group memory

The serious cognitive obstacles to a shared information structure are exposed, the uses and benefits are discussed, the effects of technology limitations are addressed and some unexpected social work impacts of the group memory are highlighted.

Abstract

Collaborating teams of knowledge workers need a common repository in which to share information gathered by individuals or developed by the team. This is difficult to achieve in practice, because individual information access strategies break down with group information—people can generally find things that are on their own messy desks and file systems, but not on other people's. The design challenge in a group memory is thus to enable low-effort information sharing without reducing individuals' finding effectiveness. This paper presents the lessons from our design and initial use of a hypertext-based group memory, TeamInfo. We expose the serious cognitive obstacles to a shared information structure, discuss the uses and benefits we have experienced, address the effects of technology limitations and highlight some unexpected social work impacts of our group memory.