TY - JOUR T1 - Collaborative support for informal information in collective memory systems JF - Information Systems Frontiers Y1 - 2000 A1 - Ackerman, Mark S A1 - Mcdonald, David W KW - CMC KW - collaborative help KW - community memory KW - computer-mediated communications KW - corporate memory KW - cscw KW - expertise sharing KW - group memory KW - help KW - incremental formalization KW - informal information KW - information access KW - information refining KW - information retrieval KW - information systems KW - knowledge shairng KW - organizational memory KW - system AB -

Informal information, such as the expertise of an organization or the workarounds practiced by a community, is a critical part of organizational or collective memory systems. From a user-centered perspective, a user merely wishes to get his work done, and to do this, he must solve his immediate problems. We have examined how to incorporate this problem solving into a collective memory, as well as how to incorporate the learning that accrues to it or from it. We report here on two systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and the Collaborative Refinery, as well as an application, Answer Garden 2, built using these two systems. The Cafe ConstructionKit provides toolkit mechanisms for incorporating communication flows among people (as well as agents) into an organizational memory framework, and the Collaborative Refinery system provides mechanisms for distilling and refining the informal information obtained through these communication flows. The Answer Garden 2 application demonstrates the utility of these two underlying systems.

VL - 2 UR - Complete ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Memory in the small: Combining collective memory and task support for a scientific community JF - Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce Y1 - 1999 A1 - Ackerman, Mark S A1 - Mandel, Eric KW - astrophysics KW - collaborative memory KW - community memory KW - data analysis KW - organizational memory KW - science community KW - scientific memory KW - system KW - UI visualizations AB -

Many forms of memory exist embedded within the processes and tasks of an organization or community. Memory in the small, or memory utilized in the performance of an institutionally important task, serves as an effective task support mechanism. By basing memory on tasks (and basing task support on memory), memory systems can provide additional and necessary support services for organizations and communities. As an example of memory in the small, in this article we describe a software system, called the ASSIST, that combines memory with task performance for a scientific community. The ASSIST utilizes and stores the collective memory of astrophysicists about data analysis, and is used worldwide by astrophysicists. In this article, we also consider the architectural and theoretical issues involved when combining memory with task performance.

VL - 9 UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Answer Garden 2: Merging Organizational Memory with Collaborative Help T2 - Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'96) Y1 - 1996 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - McDonald, David W. KW - CMC KW - collaborative help KW - community memory KW - computer-mediated communications KW - corporate memory KW - expertise sharing KW - group memory KW - help KW - information access KW - information refining KW - information retrieval KW - information systems KW - knowledge sharing KW - organizational memory AB -

This research examines a collaborative solution to a common problem, that of providing help to distributed users. The Answer Garden 2 system provides a secondgeneration architecture for organizational and community memory applications. After describing the need for Answer Garden 2’s functionality, we describe the architecture of the system and two underlying systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and Collaborative Refinery. We also present detailed descriptions of the collaborative help and collaborative refining facilities in the Answer Garden 2 system

JF - Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'96) UR - Complete ER -