Keyholes: selective sharing in close collaboration

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

Citation

Nelson, L.; Smetters, D. K.; Churchill, E. F. Keyholes: selective sharing in close collaboration. CHI 2008 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems.2008 April 5-10; Florence, Italy. NY: ACM; 2008; 2443-2452.