Practical Internet Groupware

Chapter 4. Information-Management Strategies for Groupware Users

When we collaborate online, we find, receive, and create documents, we store them, we reorganize them, we communicate them to individuals and groups. From a groupware perspective, we need to ask ourselves: Who will benefit from my storage or transmission of this document? Does it merit the attention of individuals or a group? If it should be directed to a group, then which one? From an information-management perspective, we need to ask a different set of questions: In what form should I gather documents? Where do I store them? How should document collections be organized?

We collaborate most effectively when we ask and answer all these questions. Admittedly that requires an open and interdisciplinary mindset. This chapter explores ways to add value to the kinds of things we do every day—participating in discussions, sending email, gathering feedback. These routine activities produce all sorts of documents that, collectively, represent a lot of what we know. Organizing that knowledge into useful forms is an enormous task that can never be fully accomplished. But we can make progress in the right direction by developing good habits. The techniques shown here exemplify what I mean by good habits. They cluster into three categories: understanding and using scoped zones of discussion, effective packaging of messages and threads, and strategies for collecting feedback.

Understanding and Using Scoped Zones of Discussion