Improve Personal Productivity with a Background Service
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An exploration into the concepts, directions, and opportunities in personal information and personal knowledge management. See also Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution will Change Everything; Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management; Personal Information Management.
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Improve Personal Productivity with a Background Service
- 1. Jack Davis University of Washington CSS 497 – Individual Project Professor Mark Kochanski – Faculty Advisor Gordon Watanabe and Patrick Butler Monterde – Sponsors
- 2. Manage Information Overload. Keep Found Things Found. Efficiently Task Switch Between Projects Identify automated processes to simplify and improve personal productivity.
- 3. How do people currently use Personal Information Management (PIM) and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) today? How might people better use PIM and PKM in the future? What are some of the technical and usability issues surrounding PIM and PKM? What are the qualities of products that earn brand buzz and a loyal customer following?
- 4. Prototype a background service with an extensible architecture to support an array of personal assistant plug-ins. Quickly locate and open commonly used documents, folders, and web pages. Quickly locate and recall items that I’ve identified and saved for future reference. Synchronize updated documents and files across multiple machines and locations. Insert blocks of commonly used boilerplate content.
- 5. General Categories: Global / Community – “Global Search” Enterprise / Organization – “Social Search” Personal / Individual – “Recall” / “Retrieve” The issue of “what’s in it for me?” Least Studied − Potentially the largest area for productivity improvement.
- 6. Data Information Knowledge “Knowledge = information in action” A “Language” Information-Items (the “opposable thumb”) Keeping Activities Organizing Activities Searching and Seeking Re-Finding: Teleporting and Orienteering Behaviors: Piling and Filing
- 7. “Keeping” Processes Keep Nothing, Keep Everything, Keep Smarter Organization Challenges Varied Approaches Inconsistent Approaches Fragmentation Complications Form, Miscategorization, Device, Location
- 8. Trends and Challenges Minimal Effort Multiple Organizations Inconsistency over time The “Disorganization Threshold” Better Ways to Organize The Challenge of “Search” Factors in Filing, Searching, and Tagging
- 9. Personal Task Management Additional factors effect task switching Type of task, complexity of task, task duration, length of absence, number of interruptions But there are many commonalities Information keeping makes deferrable actions of information-items. Task keeping makes deferrable actions of tasks.
- 10. Identification and Locator Technologies URIs, URLs, IRIs, URNs, XRIs, DOIs, Permalinks PURLS Content Management My Big-Arse Text File (Cornell) Living in Text Files (Turbull) Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks (O'Brien) FlatFileAdvantages (PmWiki) XML Semantic Web Resource Description Framework (RDF)
- 11. Five key requirements Performance Usability Security Reliability Compatibility The most common unmet user needs are Performance, Usability, and Security
- 13. Perform basic PIM/PKM functions Synchronize documents, files, and folders across multiple locations. Provide workflow, project, and in-context views of related information. Re-find documents and files based on personal tags and metadata. Encrypt documents and files for privacy. Digitally sign documents and files for security.
- 14. “The greatest management challenge of the 21st century – to improve the effectiveness and productivity of knowledge workers – is not even close to being met” Peter Drucker (1909-2005)
- 15. Performance | Usability | Security | Reliability | Compatibility “Innovations have to be handled by ordinary human beings, and if they are to attain any size or importance at all, by morons or near-morons. Incompetence, after all is the only thing in abundant and never-failing supply. Anything too clever, whether in design or execution, is almost bound to fail.” Peter Drucker (1919-2005), Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Editor's Notes
- Manage Information OverloadPersonal experience being overwhelmed with the amount of information, email, web content, links, documents, business materials that I have to manage, track, and deal with – and it’s growing.Keep Found Things FoundFrustrations in knowing I've seen something, need it, but can't find it again quickly.The need to be able to quickly recall, locate, and access less frequently used but important information.
- What were my original goals “Scaffolding”Does it help me tell the story for what I did? And what I learned? And what I want to tell people about what I found? What I did and what I found?Flavor of “me” in the slides e.g. “Project The ILess is more2:30-3:305:30
- Global / Community – “Global Search” (2.7.1 , p38)Knowledge management at a social/community level deals with organizing information with a focus on broad global community use and access. Global search and public wikis (e.g. Wikipedia). (see above 3-)Characterized by not knowing exactly what you’re looking for.Looking for information in an unfamiliar area.“Show me the topics that most people have found apparently most relevant”(“apparently” is the keyword).Enterprise / Organization – “Social Search” (2.7.2, p38)Knowledge management at the enterprise level deals with organizing information with a focus on use by members within a specific organization.Characterized by frequent use of internal acronyms, project names, and specialized terms.“Show me the items that people in my company, enterprise, or social environment have identified as most relevant to this topic.”Personal / Individual – “Recall” / “Retrieve” (2.7.3, p39)Knowledge management at a personal level deals with organizing retrieving information with a focus on recall and use.“Recall-Search: Given a term, locate the closest matching item(s) in the personal-information-collection of notes, documents, contacts, and links.”The issue of “what’s in it for me?”KM is typically addressed from a corporate perspective, focusing on organizational goals, ignoring the needs of the individual knowledge worker: "The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker's perspective of 'what's in it for me?'." (McGee, 2003)Least Studied – Potentially the largest area for productivity improvementOf the three categories there's far less academic study on PIM and PKMPrimarily two "academic" books on the subject (published 2008 from the UW iSchool)Personal Information Management, William Jones and Jaime TeevanKeeping Found Things Found, William JonesOnly a few books oriented toward personal information, personal knowledge management, personal productivity automation tools and techniquesUpgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker guide to working smarter, faster, better; TrapaniBit Literacy, Mark HurstThere are some good web sites on PIM and PKM but the subject is still evolving.
- INFORMATION-ITEMA tangible object that holds information that can be manipulated by a variety of means – created, acquired, viewed, stored, grouped (with other information-items), given a name and other properties, copied, distributed, moved, deleted, and so on.IS NOT: a conversation, presentation, a remembrance of an appointment.IS: an audio recording; video, handouts, or slides of a presentation; a note reminder on a piece of paper or an entry in a scheduling application.ATTRIBUTESForm: Defined by the set of tools that can manipulate the item.Deferrable: Provide means to defer thinking about or taking action on an item until a later time.COMMON INFO-ITEM QUESTIONSIs this item relevant (to me)?What does this relate to?Does this require immediate action or can this wait?If wait, how do I get back to the item later?Where should I put it for now?How, where, and will I remember to look for it?[jd] Expiration: Does the item’s relevance decline over time?(If so, how fast, and at what point is it no longer of relevance or interest?)ACTIVITIESKeeping: Decisions and actions that map information currently under consideration to anticipated needs.Organizing: Decisions and actions that relate to a scheme of information organization.PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENTACTIVITIES:Keeping: input actions to save and store information for future use.Finding: output actions to locate and retrieve previously saved information.Managing: activities associated with organizing, maintaining, and using stored information.Knowledge ManagementProcesses that organize and provide: the right information, to the right individual, at the right timeto result in: an appropriate decision, or an appropriate action (to accomplish a specific task, purpose or goal).
- 3.5 Technology – Problems and SolutionsWhile technology can make things more difficult, but it can also assist and simplify. Technology’s continuing cost reductions leads to decision-free extremes in information keeping strategies:Keep Nothing– search is cheap, just search again later.Keep Everything– keep everything, storage is cheap.With inexpensive storage, utilities could also be developed to automatically keep a copy of all information a user comes in contact with – a “keep everything” strategy could free people from having to decide about what to keep. However, even if all information does get automatically kept, studies indicate a key potential problem with the “keep everything” approach.“If people do not take specific actions to keep encountered information, they are less likely to remember to look for this information later in the right situations.”Different from “keep everything”, “keep nothing” and “keep automatically” are “keep smarter” approaches that work to assist people to make better decisions about the future needs of information-items. “Keep smarter” assisted support may include automatic filtering and other functionality, but also preserves user involvement. Also expanding on “keep smarter” approaches are studies that suggest “how information is organized” can have a large impact on the way new information is perceived and categorized.Personal Organization Approaches VaryDifferent approaches to organization have an effect on related keeping strategies.For example, people who have more elaborate folder organizations tend to file more.Personal Organization Approaches are InconsistentIndividuals may also often vary in their level of organization for different types of information.For example, a person might be highly organized with respect to their email and electronic documents,The same individual may not be as diligent with their organization of bookmarks.Fragmentation Complicates OrganizationKeeping information “in sync” becomes complicated as information becomes fragmented. Sources of information fragmentation occur when:Fragmented by Form ● Information gets categorized by form (e.g. email, electronic documents), for example: ● Emails related to “ACM Conference Trip” – stored in an email application folder ● Electronic documents related to “ACM Conference Trip” – stored in a file folderFragmented byMiscategorization ● Information gets incorrectly categorized, for example if multiple folders are created for similar purposes: ● “Trips” folder, and a “Travel” folderFragmented by Device or Location ● Information gets categorized, duplicated, or stored on different devices or in different locations: ● A home computer, portable laptop, an office workstation, a USB drive, on a Web server, on a network share
- 3.6 Personal Organization TrendsFrom a limited number of studies that examine how people manage information in different forms the following trends emerge.Minimal EffortLittle time is spent thinking about personal organization and information management practices. People do not generally take time out of their day to assess their organizations or their information management practices in general.Multiple Organizations Are TroublesomePeople complain about needing to maintain separate organizations for different forms of information and about the fragmentation of information that results.Inconsistency Creates ProblemsEven with a simple folder organization, competing organizational schemes may live in a problematic coexistence. People may apply one organization scheme one day and a different organization scheme another day.For example, “Is the expense report for the trip to LA filed in the ‘Expense Reports’ folder or in the ‘LA Trip’ folder?”Time Creates InconsistencyLack of consistency in how information is stored over time. Weeks, months, or years later people:Forgotten Organization SchemesPeople may not remember the organization scheme they originally created for filing different types of items,Switch to a New Organization SchemePeople may decide to choose a different filing organization based on new experience or troubles with the old one.Simply Forget Where to LookPeople may not recall where to look for an item when it is needed later.Disorganization ThresholdAfter reaching a “can’t stand it anymore” disorganization threshold, people may go to extraordinary efforts to re-organize their information and change their organization schemes.Better Ways to OrganizeThe Challenge of “Search”People are very familiar with the physical process of searching for something that has been set aside or misplaced.In the physical world searching can take time and be quite frustrating, but in a computer environment searching can be performed quite quickly and easily.A difficulty with even computer-based searches, however, is that the search is only as good as the expression for the information that you tell it you wish to find.If the “search for” expression doesn’t exactly match key elements within the content, the search typically won’t tell you about any possible related results.Factors in Filing, Searching, and TaggingIn organizing information people typically use one or a combination of three basic techniques: filing, searching, or tagging.Each technique has particular uses, benefits, and efficiencies for storing and retrieving information.In many cases people have learned to use combinations of these techniques, and in fact there appears to be a large degree of personal preference based on learned behavior and individual experience developed over a period of time.For example, if a person came from a home where the parents were highly organized, they probably were taught at an early age the principals of organizing items for storing (filing) and quickly locating items later.A difficulty with filing is that you still have to remember the one specific location (folder) where the item is stored.Tagging and BookmarkingReferences:Tags: Metadata as a ‘filing system’Filing versus TaggingSearch vs Filing vs TaggingTagging: filing, annotating … and rhetoric (?)Tagging: What is Tagging and Why Should We Do It?CHI Panel - TaggingLive Search "Usefulness of Tags"Picking Up Where Search Leaves Off (Greene, 2005)Usefulness of Tags (Melenhorst & van Setten, 2007)Tags, keywords, and inconsistency (Green, 2005)Tags, Search Effectiveness, Personal Benefits (Karrer, 2006)Where Tagging Works and Where Tagging Doesn’t Work (Ives, 2006)Where Tagging WorksTagging Not Likely the Killer Solution for SearchTagging: Searching using community expertiseThe Value of Social Tagging in a Corporate Setting (Lemieux, 2007) – “moderated tagging”Raytheon employees love to tag URLsSocial Tagging In the Enterprise?Social Tagging SoftwareDelicious vs. SearchA cognitive analysis of taggingA social analysis of taggingEven More Tagging Articles (Ives, 2006) (++)The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users (Slacker Manager, 2005)Concept: – tag relevance weightings!
- 3.7 Personal Task ManagementInterruptions and task switching are also common experiences that knowledge workers have to deal with. In additional to managing personal-information-collections, knowledge workers need to develop knowledge management techniques and tools to handle interruptions and task switching with minimal effort.“A Diary Study of Task Switching and Interruptions” (Czerwinski, Horvitz, & Wilhite, 2004)<LOCAL> study explores the affects of task switching and interruptions on knowledge workers. The study shows that the overhead and perceived difficulty of switching between tasks is influenced by several factors:The type of task.The task complexity.The task duration.The length of absence.The number of interruptions.Complex tasks that are interrupted and then must be continued later were shown to comprise a significant portion of an information worker’s time. One of the key uses for informationkeeping is to make deferrable actions of information-items. The studies suggest that efficient methods to make task keeping a similar deferrable action could reduce the difficulty in handling both interruptions and situations of multitasking. The studies explore potential methods to assist in task keeping/re-finding such as a tool that could record and then later reconfigure the layout of multiple application windows associated with a task in-process.Personal Task Management many elements in common with Personal Information Management and Personal Knowledge Management.
- Identification and Locator TechnologiesFuture-Proofing Your URIs (Bruchez, 2006) <LOCAL>Fighting Linkrot (Nielsen, 1998) <LOCAL>URIs - Uniform Resource Identifiers (RFC3986)URLs - Uniform Resource LocatorsA URL is a URI that both identifies a resource and specifies the means for locating the resource through a defined access mechanism. Commonly synonymous with URI (although URI has broader connotations).IRIs - Internationalized Resource IdentifiersRFC 3897: Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs). IRIs extends URIs to support a full range of Unicode characters (Unicode/ISO 10646).URNs - Uniform Resource NamesA Uniform Resource Name (URN) is a URI that uses the urn scheme to name and identify resources.Both URNs (names) and URLs (locators) are URIs, and a particular URI may be a name and a locator at the same time. However unlike a URL that identifies the location of a resource that may change, a URN is intended to provide a persistent, location-independent resource identifier – the URL (location) for a resource may change at times but a resource URN (name) should remain the same. URNs are part of the larger Internet information architecture that is composed of URNs, URCs, and URLs. (Wikipedia, 2008)URNs – Uniform Resource Names are used for resource identificationURCs – Uniform Resource Characteristics are used for defining metadata about a resource. URLs – Uniform Resource Locators are used for locating or finding resources.XRIs - Extensible Resource IdentifiersExtensible Resource Identifiers, “XRIs” were proposed OASIS standards committee as scheme and resolution protocol for abstract identifiers compatible with URIs and IRIs. The intent of XRI is to provide a standard syntax and discovery format for abstract, structured identifiers that are domain-, location-, application-, and transport-independent. As such, XRIs can be shared across multiple domains, directories, and protocols.URI (base) à IRI (international Unicode) à XRI (extended syntax)The XRI 2.0 failed voting approval as a standard due to comments by the W3C Technical Architectural Group (W3C TAG) that functionality of the OASIS XRIs by the W3C’s extension of URIs for IRIs that add support international Unicode characters.DOA/DOIs - Digital Object Architecture / Digital Object IdentifiersDisadvantage of DOIs: Requires payment of license fee to become a member.PermalinksBlog page URLs typically link the most recent entry created by the blogger. To reference individual articles the blogger includes a permalink reference URL that provides a link that that specific article. Other than styling and formatting to make them somewhat human-readable, a Permalink is in fact simply a URL that links to a specific (older) article rather than the bloggers most recent article.PURLs - Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (Partial Redirection)A PURL is a URL that rather than linking directly to a web source, provides a level of indirection to access a web source. Originated by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC, located in Dublin, Ohio),PURLs are useful for situations where a URL changes and web content is moved to a different URL location.Using a PURL, the PURL URL remains the same, and a redirectable target URL can be specified and changed to a new URL if the web content is moved later. PURL is a URL but instead of pointing directly to an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service.The PURL Resolution Service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client. The client then completes the URL transaction in the normal manner.In Web terms, a PURL performs an HTTP redirect.Partial RedirectionPURL supports the concept of partial redirection where a domain is used as a prefix for a localized hierarchy of URLs. The PURL Resolver performs partial redirection by resolving as much of a PURL as defined in its database and appending the remainder (the unresolved portion) to the end of the resolved URL.For example, if the PURL partial redirect exists in the PURL Resolver database:Defined in PURL DatabaseAssociated Target URLhttp://purl.foo.com/bar/http://your.Web.server/your/Web/root/An attempt to resolve: http://purl.foo.com/bar/some/stuff.htmlwill resolve to the URL: http://your.Web.server/your/Web/root/some/stuff.htmlhttp://purl.oclc.org/net/jack.davis/ à http://home.att.net/~jdavis7/Why Plain Text? (Trapani, LifeHacker: 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day, 2006, p. 6)“Plain text is application and operating-system agnostic.It’s searchable, portable, lightweight, and easily manipulated.It works when someone else’s web server is down or your Outlook .pst file is corrupted.It’s free, and because it’s been around since the dawn of computing time, it’s safe to say that plain text is completely future-proof.It’s unstructured (JD: though structured XML offer many benefits)There’s no exporting and importing, no databases or tags or flags or stars or prioritizing or Insert-Company-Name-Here–induced rules on what you can and can’t do with it.”
- PKM Tool Requirements (6, pg42)There are five fundamental key requirements that must be met or any new process or tool to satisfy the needs of knowledge workers. These five core requirements include: Performance, Reliability, Security, Usability, and Compatibility.Performance – a new process or tool must offer a significant improvement in performance over existing methods. If not, why change? Changing itself requires time to learn a new tool or process. Any initial learning time must be quick and the benefit in improved performance must be obvious.Usability – a new process or tool must be innately simple to use. The time to learn a new process or tool must be quick, and once its basics have been learned, intuitive in use.Druckerism: “Innovations have to be handled by ordinary human beings, and if they are to attain any size or importance at all, by morons or near-morons. Incompetence, after all is the only thing in abundant and never-failing supply. Anything too clever, whether in design or execution, is almost bound to fail.” (Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1993, p. 136)Security – a new process or tool must be secure. Confidential personal and business information must be retained in a protected and secure environment. Confidential information such as proprietary business information and business contacts, or personal information such account numbers and password are at potential risk from numerous sources. Loss of confidential information and the additional time to take to mitigate and replace a security loss can again quickly outweigh the benefits a new process or tool provides.Reliability – a new process or tool must be reliable. Related with performance, a process or tool that is unreliable takes additional effort to work with. Any additional time or effort incurred due to lack of reliability can quickly outweigh the benefits a new process or tool provides.Compatibility – a new process or tool must be compatible with existing common standard hardware and operating systems.Of the five core requirements described above, the most important common unmet user needs are: Performance, Usability, and Security. The development of any new process or tool must have a solid with these three needs.
- Dr. Noriaki Kano’s 1984 paper on "attractive quality" presents the Kano Model, a tool to help clarify how to create great products that delight customers.The Kano Model shows that just to get in the door, you have to meet customers' basic needs.After meeting basic needs, there are two areas for differentiation:increase performance by adding features, ordiscover needs that customers aren't even aware of and delight them by meeting these needs.Kano noted that increasing performance by adding features gives linear results—customer satisfaction is increased in direct proportion to the increased performance.To get an exponential increase in satisfaction, you need to discover and meet unmet needs that surprise and delight customers.Kano notes that great products do not come from simply listening to what customers ask for, but from developing a deep understanding of the customer's world, discovering unmet needs, and surprising customers by catering to these needs.One process designed to create value-innovation products was shown in BOS
- Operating as an integrated background service, an enhanced PIM/PKM tool would monitor and respond to user interactions to: Perform basic PIM and PKM tasks (see above)Insert text (boilerplate plain-text common today)Open a folderOpen a documentNavigate to a web pageLaunch an applicationExecute a scriptStart an emailMove or copy a document or file to folderSynchronize documents, files, and folders across multiple locations.Between multiple computers, file shares, the web. For exampleInsert boilerplate content compositions of rich text, links, and graphics,Implement using RTF, xhtml, or ???Manage versions of documents, files, and folders in multiple locations.Manage links to documents and files in multiple locations.Manage persistent-links to documents and files.Facilitate activity-focused organization with in-context information views. (see above)Re-find documents and files based on personally set tags and metadata.Content-Link to a document, file, or internal selection.Would operate similar to an OLE object.Would operate with document, audio, and video files.Support multiple modes of user interactionKeyboardMouse gesturesPen gestures (tablet PCs)Spoken (i.e. voice recognition)Touch and hand gestures (touch and motion PCs)Eye Tracking (future)Combinations of the aboveDigitally sign documents and files.Identifies the signerDetects if the document or file has been modified after signing.Encrypt documents and files for privacy or to restrict access to authorized individuals or groups.Authorize access by password, X509 certificate, OpenID, and other means TBD.Import and export varied application information types and formats. (see above)Plug-in architecture for expanding functionality.Facilitate information and knowledge exchange between family, friends, colleagues, groups, businesses, and the world.
- From the book Management Challenges for the 21st Century (Drucker, 2002)Peter Drucker (1909-2005) credited with coining the term “knowledge worker” in 1959.Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker)Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909–November 11, 2005) was a writer, management consultant, and self-described “social ecologist.”[1] Widely considered to be the father of “modern management,” his 39 books and countless scholarly and popular articles explored how humans are organized across all sectors of society—in business, government and the nonprofit world.[2] His writings have predicted many of the major developments of the late twentieth century, including privatization and decentralization; the rise of Japan to economic world power; the decisive importance of marketing; and the emergence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong learning.[3] In 1959, Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker" and later in his life considered knowledge work productivityto be the next frontier of management.[4]
- Druckerism: “Innovations have to be handled by ordinary human beings, and if they are to attain any size or importance at all, by morons or near-morons. Incompetence, after all is the only thing in abundant and never-failing supply. Anything too clever, whether in design or execution, is almost bound to fail.” (Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1993, p. 136)PKM Tool Requirements (6, pg42)There are five fundamental key requirements that must be met or any new process or tool to satisfy the needs of knowledge workers. These five core requirements include: Performance, Reliability, Security, Usability, and Compatibility.Performance – a new process or tool must offer a significant improvement in performance over existing methods. If not, why change? Changing itself requires time to learn a new tool or process. Any initial learning time must be quick and the benefit in improved performance must be obvious.Usability – a new process or tool must be innately simple to use. The time to learn a new process or tool must be quick, and once its basics have been learned, intuitive in use.Security – a new process or tool must be secure. Confidential personal and business information must be retained in a protected and secure environment. Confidential information such as proprietary business information and business contacts, or personal information such account numbers and password are at potential risk from numerous sources. Loss of confidential information and the additional time to take to mitigate and replace a security loss can again quickly outweigh the benefits a new process or tool provides.Reliability – a new process or tool must be reliable. Related with performance, a process or tool that is unreliable takes additional effort to work with. Any additional time or effort incurred due to lack of reliability can quickly outweigh the benefits a new process or tool provides.Compatibility – a new process or tool must be compatible with existing common standard hardware and operating systems.Of the five core requirements described above, the most important common unmet user needs are: Performance, Usability, and Security. The development of any new process or tool must have a solid with these three needs.
- Operating as an integrated background service, an enhanced PIM/PKM tool would monitor and respond to user interactions to: Perform basic PIM and PKM tasks (see above)Insert text (boilerplate plain-text common today)Open a folderOpen a documentNavigate to a web pageLaunch an applicationExecute a scriptStart an emailMove or copy a document or file to folderSynchronize documents, files, and folders across multiple locations.Between multiple computers, file shares, the web. For example:Insert boilerplate content compositions of rich text, links, and graphics,Implement using RTF, xhtml, or ???Manage versions of documents, files, and folders in multiple locations.Manage links to documents and files in multiple locations.Manage persistent-links to documents and files.Facilitate activity-focused organization with in-context information views. (see above)Re-find documents and files based on personally set tags and metadata.Content-Link to a document, file, or internal selection.Would operate similar to an OLE object.Would operate with document, audio, and video files.Support multiple modes of user interactionKeyboardMouse gesturesPen gestures (tablet PCs)Spoken (i.e. voice recognition)Touch and hand gestures (touch and motion PCs)Eye Tracking (future)Combinations of the aboveDigitally sign documents and files.Identifies the signerDetects if the document or file has been modified after signing.Encrypt documents and files for privacy or to restrict access to authorized individuals or groups.Authorize access by password, X509 certificate, OpenID, and other means TBD.Import and export varied application information types and formats. (see above)Plug-in architecture for expanding functionality.Facilitate information and knowledge exchange between family, friends, colleagues, groups, businesses, and the world.
- INFORMATION-ITEMA tangible object that holds information that can be manipulated by a variety of means – created, acquired, viewed, stored, grouped (with other information-items), given a name and other properties, copied, distributed, moved, deleted, and so on.IS NOT: a conversation, presentation, a remembrance of an appointment.IS: an audio recording; video, handouts, or slides of a presentation; a note reminder on a piece of paper or an entry in a scheduling application.ATTRIBUTESForm: Defined by the set of tools that can manipulate the item.Deferrable: Provide means to defer thinking about or taking action on an item until a later time.ACTIVITIESKeeping: Decisions and actions that map information currently under consideration to anticipated needs.Organizing: Decisions and actions that relate to a scheme of information organization.COMMON INFO-ITEM QUESTIONSIs this item relevant (to me)?What does this relate to?Does this require immediate action or can this wait?If wait, how do I get back to the item later?Where should I put it for now?How, where, and will I remember to look for it?[jd] Expiration: Does the item’s relevance decline over time?(If so, how fast, and at what point is it no longer of relevance or interest?)PERSONAL INFORMATION – multiple contexts:Information that a person keeps for personal use. <- this is the only one we talk about.Information about a person kept by others.Information experienced by a person but not necessarily in the person’s control (e.g., a borrowed book).Information directed to a person (e.g., email).PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENTACTIVITIES:Keeping: input actions to save and store information for future use.Finding: output actions to locate and retrieve previously saved information.Managing: activities associated with organizing, maintaining, and using stored information.Knowledge ManagementProcesses that organize and provide: the right information, to the right individual, at the right timeto result in: an appropriate decision, or an appropriate action (to accomplish a specific task, purpose or goal).Personal Knowledge ManagementIntegrates:Personal Information ManagementPersonal skillsKnowledge ManagementPersonal:The centrality of “managing oneself”The motivation of "what's in it for me?“Example processesStore, organize, and recall information quicklyPause and resume work with minimal overhead (manage priorities with efficient task switching).Save personal, proprietary, and business information quickly and securely.Perform automated "housekeeping" such as recall, synchronize, archive, or delete items of time-sensitive value (e.g. with either increasing or decreasing relevance)
- SEARCHING (aka “Seeking” and “Finding”)Processes associated with locating new information for the first time.TeleportingJumping directly to items such as through keyword-search.RE-FINDINGProcesses associated of finding information that has been seen before.Re-finding is typically very different from the process of searching for information the first time.People remember the experience of searching for information initially, and think differently about re-finding it again later.OrienteeringNavigating to items in incremental steps based on contextual knowledge(e.g. locating a file within a hierarchy of folders and subfolders.)
- Search tools don’t always work.Internet and desktop keyword-based search tools don't work effectively for locating items within the context of one’s personal-information-space.Orienteering can be easier than trying to say what you want.Grammatically expressing what you’ re looking can be hard – many people “can't easily do it”, or “prefer not to”. (“Cognitive Ease”)Habit – (orienteering is) “the way I remember first”.You know where you’re at (provides a “sense of location”).You work in a known space – steps by URL manipulation, bookmarks, history, etc.You can backtrack – follow the information “scent”, you're never at a dead endYou know what you find (provides a “understanding of the answer”)Context trust provides understanding for a thorough search.Understanding of negative results –I looked everywhere “I'm convinced... it doesn't exist.”Search strategies vary:Studies report that the usage of teleporting or orienteering for Internet search vary by individual Pilers are more likely to navigate to a site and then perform a site search(an orienteering behavior of searching in small steps).Filers were more likely to search in large steps using a general purpose search engine.
- KEEPINGFiling BehaviorSorting and organizing documents and bookmarks within a hierarchy of folders and subfolders is a filing behavior.Piling BehaviorItems are simply piled together in a single location or folder. Storing and maintaining all emails within a single inbox is an example of a piling behavior.MANAGINGMaintaining and organizingActions of creating, maintaining, and updating the organization of stored information.Managing privacy, security, and distributionActions to control the privacy, security, archiving, and distribution of stored information.Measuring and evaluatingActions to assess the efficiency of the finding and keeping activities along with the structures, strategies, and tools supporting information stores.Making sense of and using informationActions to understand the information that has been stored and how it can best be used.
- The ILess is more2:30-3:305:30