Collaborative Genres for Collaboration: Genre Systems in Digital Media

Using the concept of genre, we examined the use of TeamRoom to facilitate collaborative work in one organization.Team Room is a collaborative application built withinLotus Notes and designed specifically to support teamswithin organizational settings. We studied three teams'communication in Team Room over seven months andfound that some of the genres they enacted formed sets ofinterdependent genres or "genre systems," which facilitatedcollaboration among team members. The teams' use ofthese genre systems (meeting documentation, collaborativerepository, and collaborative authoring) varied in ways thatreflected differences in team size, task, and orientationtowards the new technology. The three genre systemsobserved in Team Room demonstrate different forms ofelectronic collaboration that both build on and vary fromcollaboration in traditional media. Based on the notion ofcollaborative genres, we suggest insights for research andpractical implications for system designers and users.