Mail2Tag: augmenting email for sharing with implicit tag-based categorization

Abstract

New technology can disrupt existing social processes, especially those formed within the workplace email habitat. Recent abundance of sharing tool choices and disruption of practices makes for a lack of agreement and coherence in the use of information sharing tools. At work, email remains the primary way for sharing information, despite years of knowledge management research. We examine the design of a system for lightweight organizational sharing called Mail2Tag, which augments email by utilizing existing email sharing practices to help gather content, implicitly organize that content, and evolve both the shared content and the groups of people interested in that content. The vision is to get the right information to the right people at the right time, without increasing overall information noise.