Collaborative activity management: organizing documents for collective action

Workplace collaborators make use of diverse types of documents and other resources. Traditionally, each type of document has been stored in its own repository, and people have had to manage multiple documents in multiple storage services. Workplace collaborators often have complex, ad hoc working relations that are partially executed through their shared documents. Traditionally, dependencies among documents and other objects have gone unrecorded, or have been stored in a piecemeal manner inside the documents, or have been objectified and rigidified in workflow engines. Workplace collaborators often need to coordinate with one another, both asynchronously and in real-time, and often in the context of their shared documents. Traditionally, people had no idea of the status of their collaborators, or they have had to consult other, unrelated services for awareness or presence information about their colleagues.

We aim to change that. I will describe our research, findings, and possible futures of systems and services that are intended to unify the ways that people collaborate with and through shared documents. In our ActivityExplorer project, users innovated new ways of using our software, showing that a service with collections of shared documents, fine-grained access control, persistent communications, and real-time status information could serve diverse needs of a workplace of individuals, teams, and communities. Our Unified Activity Management project explored the harvesting of collective enactments, and their crystallization into work practices templates and rich placeholders for future collaborations. These ideas have led to successful technology transfer, and are making their way into products.

In the course of this work, we sometimes found that simple ideas were much more popular than expected, paradoxically creating new challenges for users. I will describe two of those challenges, and our attempts to meet them. This new research has led us into domains of interruption management, machine learning, and very much into social computing, including technology transfer into another generation of collaboration products.

People work together through direct communication and through shared documents. At every turn, people surprise us with their ingenuity and their ability to create new human and technological solutions with the systems that we offer them. I will close with a discussion of the concept of reinvention (innovation through usage), and how technology developers and users can learn from one another through cycles of development and usage, with innovative contributions from all parties at each turn of the cycle.