Collaboration Practices within Personal Information Space

Each one of us has our own way of managing personal information. We have to decide on organizational structures and among other things about placement and naming of information items. Most of the knowledge behind information management decisions is only known to its owner. Most of it is also lost in formal organization structures and cannot be deciphered by an outsider. However, even if personal space of information holds our own personal note, it still carries a lot of collaboration activities as tasks and projects often involve other people. In our study on the difference between how people manage project-related information and how they perceive and visualize it (tacit knowledge), several collaboration practices emerged. We grouped our observations of collaboration into three categories: (1) the creation of a personal information collection out of shared information, (2) the use of email as an essential tool for file distribution and (3) the linkage of project collaborators to their files rather than projects.