From PIM to GIM: Personal Information Management in Group Contexts

The more our personal information is stored in digital form, the easier it is to share. Personal information may be shared intentionally to facilitate an individual end. It may emerge as input to a routine organizational process. It may leak out accidentally due to inattention or ignorance. However it comes to light, when personal information becomes the province of a group—whether a coterie of intimates, a series of bureaucrats, or a vast, curious public—the ways it is used and managed change. As our transition to a digital society continues and personal information becomes increasingly available, researchers and developers must pay close attention to the interaction between personal information and group contexts.

Personal information management (PIM) plays both instrumental and symbolic roles in our lives. Artifacts, such as to-do lists, calendars, and rolodexes, aid users in conducting their daily lives. PIM artifacts also play a symbolic role by shaping the impressions that others form of their users. Thus, a Day-Timer—available in an array of materials ("an expression of your unique style," says the Day-Timer Web site)—can help its user appear to be a productive, well-organized professional. And if PIM artifacts are adroitly deployed and achieve their ends, the user’s performance enhances that impression.

Although PIM is usually a private activity, we often create personal information with sharing in mind. A student may take notes to share with an absent friend. A co-worker may share his calendar to more easily schedule meetings. But sharing may lead to problems; for example, the student’s notes may be messy and poorly organized, and the worker’s calendar may reveal consistently long lunch dates with a fellow employee. When personal information is shared, it produces tensions between the ends for which it is shared and the not-necessarily desirable symbolic inferences it may support.

The tensions that naturally occur as personal information is shared are complex and intertwined. They may feed back and affect norms having to do with the structure and content of what is shared; for example, the student may be motivated to take better notes, and the co-worker may create counterfeit calendar entries to obscure his activities. More positively, a group may structure information in a shared repository, making it useful to all. It is this feedback cycle—whereby sharing information creates tensions that shape what and how the information is shared—that makes this area an important focus for research attention.

I use the phrase group information management (GIM) to refer to PIM as it functions in more public spheres. More specifically, GIM has to do with how personal information is shared with a group, emphasizing the norms that underlie that sharing, as well as the ways participants negotiate these norms in response to the tensions that sharing inevitably produces.

Applications used for GIM include email, Web pages, and wikis, though some fall more squarely into the GIM arena than others. A longstanding example of GIM is online calendaring; when first introduced in the mid-1980s, it encountered some resistance from users, who realized that formerly private calendar entries could be used for ends other than to schedule meetings. A relatively new GIM genre is social networking services (such as Orkut, LinkedIn, and Friendster) that allow users to post personal profiles and create links to other people to signify professional or social ties; they are in turn used for purposes ranging from professional networking to dating. They also raise questions about what users choose to reveal or conceal, how their disclosure of personal information is related to the ends they hope to achieve, and the ethics of "counterfeiting" links or conspiring to garner "inauthentic" recommendations to increase their stature in the system.

Another example of GIM is patient medical records consisting of information generated by multiple people (and devices) and accessed by people from different institutions for purposes ranging from care coordination to insurance billing. This application raises complex ethical, legal, and practical questions concerning privacy, access, and ownership.

To gain a broader understanding of these issues, consider a simplified model of GIM involving a person who generates information that is to be shared with a group in support of a task:

• The person generates information. How should the to-be-shared information be created? What information would people choose to share? Why do they want to share it? How would they structure it? What norms attend sharing? How do the norms vary according to form, content, and task? And how are they negotiated?;
• Shares it with a group. Who will share the information? How are these people to be selected? How does this imagined audience affect the nature of the information to be shared? How is the information structured so the group is most able to use it, and what process is to be used to negotiate such a shared structure? What are the consequences of "leaking" information beyond the intended audience? And how might GIM systems be designed to support users dealing with these issues?; and
• Supports a task. What happens when shared information turns out to be useful for other tasks that are not in the owner’s best interests? To what extent is it possible to give users control over the uses of their personal information? What sorts of control—awareness of usage, correction of errors, retraction upon completion of the task—is it feasible to provide the information owner?

These issues arise from a model of information sharing that is far too simple. Contrary to its implications, personal information is not always produced voluntarily (credit records) or by a single person (medical records). The groups with which information is shared are rarely static; new people join, even as established members drop out. Information isn’t necessarily shared with identifiable, accountable individuals; it may instead be shared with an organization in which different people fill the same roles (such as as a claims processor). Nor is personal information necessarily used for a single task. And the differing nature of tasks (such as using the same medical records to coordinate care and for insurance billing) can introduce tensions that shape the information’s content and structure, as well as how it is categorized, accessed, controlled, and used.

As various forms of personal information circulate through the world’s increasingly networked groups and institutions, researchers and developers alike must understand GIM’s implications for the design of information systems. Although GIM today is not a distinct field, it could soon provide a forum for consolidating social, legal, and business issues emerging in a number of domains.

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