Collaborative Genres for Collaboration: Genre Systems in Digital Media

Using the concept of genre, we examined the use of Team Room to facilitate collaborative work in one organization. Team Room is a collaborative application built within Lotus Notes and designed specifically to support teams within organizational settings. We studied three teams’ communication in Team Room over seven months and found that some of the genres they enacted formed sets of interdependent genres or “genre systems,” which facilitated collaboration among team members. The teams’ use of these genre systems (meeting documentation, collaborative repository, and collaborative authoring) varied in ways that reflected differences in team size, task, and orientation towards the new technology. The three genre systems observed in Team Room demonstrate different forms of electronic collaboration that both build on and vary from collaboration in traditional media. Based on the notion of collaborative genres, we suggest insights for research and practical implications for system designers and users.