Coordinating information using genres

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate how a community may use genres for coordinating information. Genres help coordinate information related to resources, place and time since members in the community have enacted genres in the past and have expectations of the socially recognized information that genres bring. Using the HICSS website, we illustrate that genres are used for coordinating information addressing aspects of coordination mechanisms such as divisibility, concurrency, accessibility and timing that help people improve the coordination of work processes. We model these aspects using the Process Handbook, a process knowledge repository developed at MIT, and suggest that system designers and users may benefit from an explicit recognition of the coordination provided by using genres and by exploration of similar coordination through the use of this repository. 1.