Looking through the keyhole: snippet sharing in close collaborations

Abstract

Our studies reveal that people in practice share entire documents when portions would suffice. Readers hunt for relevant information. Authors describe laborious processes of selective sharing and redaction. Overload and loss of focus arises. We demonstrate Keyholes, content annotations where authors or readers enter meta-data within a document to indicate what gets shared, with whom, and why. We build upon established practices (tags, social annotation, and command-line automation) and existing infrastructures for content manipulation and sharing. This creates new social dynamism within document texts, letting access to content expand or contract as a collaboration unfolds.