Cloudy Forecast: An Exploration of the Factors Underlying Shared Repository Use

Many teams are now adopting shared repositories for their work. Such adoption is paradoxical, however, as past research has repeatedly shown major co-organizational barriers; teams cannot agree a common organizational scheme, making it difficult to retrieve information organized by others. Another barrier is email competition; email provides a reliable alternative for distributing files that are then personally organized. To address this paradox, we explored how 27 participants actively using shared repositories overcome these barriers in a qualitative study. We found teams addressed co-organization using 4 strategies. First they create ContentMaps that provide explicit structure to organize shared information. Participants also co-organize using implicit strategies based on task structure, expertise, and tool affordances. Greater shared repository use also leads to a changed role for email. Versioning problems mean email is not used for distributing attachments, instead for task management. We present technical implications suggesting how new tools might be better integrated with email facilitating these continued email uses. Author Keywords Shared repositories; co-organization; email competition