Keyholes: Selective Sharing in Close Collaboration

Keywords:

Information sharing, collaboration, annotation, clipping,text snippets, distributed work, tags, content, segmentation, access control

Abstract:

Documents are changing, becoming more malleable. Content operations progress, from command lines to annotation and tagging. Our studies reveal that people in practice share entire documents when portions would suffice. Readers hunt for relevant information. Authors describe laborious processes of selective sharing and redaction. Overload and loss of focus arises. We describe Keyholes, content annotations where authors or readers enter meta-data within a document to indicate what gets shared, with whom, and why. We argue that leveraging established practices (tags, social annotation, and command-line automation) clashes with CHI notions of technical contribution, but creates new social dynamism within document texts.