Group information management

Group information management (GIM) is an extension of personal information management (PIM) "as it functions in more public spheres"[1] as a result of peoples' efforts to share and co-manage information,[2] and has been a topic of study for researchers in PIM, human–computer interaction (HCI), and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW).[3] People acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items to support individual needs, but these PIM activities are often embedded in group or organizational contexts[3] and performed with sharing in mind.[1] The act of sharing moves personal information into spheres of group activity and also creates tensions that shape what and how the information is shared. The practice and the study of GIM focuses on this interaction between personal information and group contexts.

Issues in the study and practice

Challenges of GIM that have been identified or studied in literature include situating individual workspaces within group contexts;[4] the lack of conventions in sharing information;[5] integrating and negotiating the varied approaches to organizing information;[6][7][8] understanding information spaces that others have personalized;[9] and retrieving information from shared spaces.[10]

Improved software may help to alleviate some of these challenges,[11] for example by analyzing group activities[12] or improving Web services that support shared folders.[10][13] Faced with the limitations of current software, users often prefer more traditional, ad hoc methods of sharing information, such as the use of e-mail attachments,[14] and will even circumvent institutionalized software to do so.[15] Therefore, the need for understanding and improving collaborative information tasks is clearly great, and work remains to be done. Other issues include:

  • formerly private calendar entries could be used for ends other than scheduling meetings
  • what users choose to reveal or conceal
  • how their disclosure of personal information is related to the ends that they hope to achieve
  • the ethics of 'counterfeiting' links or conspiring to garner 'inauthentic' recommendations to increase their stature in the system.
  • complex questions of privacy and access and ownership. (user control, privacy and trust)
  • user reliance on system defaults

Tool support

See also

References
  1. Erickson, T. (2006). From PIM to GIM: personal information management in group contexts. Commun. ACM 49, 1 (Jan. 2006), 74-75. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1107458.1107495; Pre-press full-text: http://tomeri.org/FromPIMtoGIM_CACM06.html
  2. Jones, W., Dinneen, J.D., Capra, R., Pérez-Quiñones, M., & Diekema, A. (2015). Personal Information Management (PIM). To appear in McDonald, J.D., & Levine-Clark, M. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Fourth Edition. CRC Press.
  3. Lutters, W.G., Ackerman, M.S. & Zhou, X. (2007). "Group Information Management." In William Jones and Jaime Teevan (Eds.), Personal Information Management (pp. 236-248), Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pre-press full-text: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~ackerm/pub/06e08/PIM-lutters-ackerman-zhou.prepress.pdf
  4. B. J. Hicks, A. Dong, R. Palmer, and H. C. Mcalpine. (2008). "Organizing and managing personal electronic files: A mechanical engineer's perspective," ACM Transactions on Information Systems vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 1–40.
  5. G. Mark and W. Prinz. (1997). "What happened to our document in the shared workspace? The need for Groupware conventions," in Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT'97, pp. 413–420.
  6. L. M. Berlin, R. Jeffries, V. L. O'Day, A. Paepcke, and C. Wharton. (1993). "Where did you put it?: issues in the design and use of group memory," in Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, INTERACT '93 AND CHI '93, Amsterdam, pp. 23–30.
  7. R. Capra, E. Vardell, and K. Brennan. (2014). "File Synchronization and Sharing: User Practices and Challenges," in 77th ASIS&T Annual Meeting, October 31- November 5, 2014. Seattle, WA, USA.
  8. V. Wulf. (1997). "Storing and retrieving documents in a shared workspace: experiences from the political administration," in Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT'97, pp. 469–476.
  9. P. Dourish, J. Lamping, and T. Rodden. (1999). "Building bridges: customisation and mutual intelligibility in shared category management," in Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, pp. 11–20.
  10. O. Bergman, S. Whittaker, and N. Falk. (2014). "Shared files: The retrieval perspective," J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. vol. 65, number 10, pp. 1949–1963.
  11. S. Voida, W. K. Edwards, M. W. Newman, R. E. Grinter, and N. Ducheneaut. (2006). "Share and share alike: exploring the user interface affordances of file sharing," in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, pp. 221–230.
  12. W. Prinz and B. Zaman. (2005). "Proactive support for the organization of shared workspaces using activity patterns and content analysis," in Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, pp. 246–255.
  13. C. Marshall and J. C. Tang. (2012). "That Syncing Feeling: Early User Experiences with the Cloud," in Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, New York, NY, USA, 2012, pp. 544–553.
  14. R. Capra, G. Marchionini, J. Velasco-Martin, and K. Muller, "Tools-at-hand and learning in multisession, collaborative search," in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA, 2010, pp. 951–960.
  15. M. L. Johnson, S. M. Bellovin, R. W. Reeder, and S. E. Schechter, "Laissez-faire file sharing: access control designed for individuals at the endpoints," in Proceedings of the 2009 workshop on New security paradigms workshop, 2009, pp. 1–10.
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