Mash Me Up, Mash Me Down: Restructuring Email for Content Sharing and Collaboration in Distributed Teams

Distributed teams working across organizational boundaries often experience difficulties in sharing digital materials that are essential to their work. Although work deliverables require content co-production and exchange, we find that differing sociotechnical practices, user access restrictions to file servers and divergent naming and filing practices impede smooth workflow operations. In this paper we describe a trans-organizational practice for extending a commonly available set of collaboration tools (email and file sharing) to address the information sharing requirements of a widely distributed project team. Our solution supports the sharing of digital materials such as domain documents, working notes, and coordination documents using email – the ubiquitous content sharing tool. To do this, we restructure the email client in a manner that preserves its original familiarity and functions, and extends it with text analysis, recommended personal tags, and agreed-upon, group tag naming conventions for automatic filing to shared repositories. We discuss how the practice and supporting technology work with the emerging “mashup” and “mashdown” notions of software development.