Considering Collaborative Filtering as Groupware: Experiences and Lessons Learned

Large information repositories, such as the World Wide Web or Usenet News, ooer an amazing wealth of information. Searching for valuable information is an eeort that permanently occurs in organizations and that contributes to the organizational memory. Active collaborative ltering builds on the exploitation of the results of this eeort by encouraging the members of an organization to share information with others. To this extent , the members are provided with a tool that allows for the distribution of information with little eeort. However, it is unclear which strategy is best to bootstrap or to enhance a self-supporting information dissemination activity. In this paper, we report on experiences we made when trying to bootstrap an active collaborative ltering activity in a medium-size organization. Our experiences suggest to view collaborative ltering as groupware in order to explain certain diiculties and to learn from the experiences with groupware.