Designs for Systems to Support Collaborative Information Behavior

There are several reasons for humans to work together. For one, sometimes a problem is just too complex for a single individual to tackle. Denning & Yaholkovsky (2008) regard such problems as “messy” or “wicked” and argue that collaboration is essential for resolving such messes. When it comes to accessing or processing some information, it seems that in many situations, multiple people working together will be able to do a better job than any one of them individually, given that they have appropriate tools. For instance, Olson et al. (1993) developed ShrEdit, a shared text editor. To their surprise, they discovered that the groups working with ShrEdit generated fewer design ideas, but apparently better ones. They believed their tool helped the supported groups keep more focused on the core issues in the emerging design, to waste less time on less important topics, and to capture what was said as they went. Despite the importance of collaboration in many situations, there is a lack of support for people working to collaborate on information ABsTRAcT