Made out of people

Indexing by people

Back at HCIC, I saw a talk by a team at NASA Ames. They were discussing their shared whiteboard system; it's used for part of the Mars lander team. Their system is based around shared data spaces that are keyed to the author of the docment, and a set of "interested people." Also, by default, files are named by the date and time of the file.

That is: you can't necessarily easily see the name of a file. But you can find out what type it is (and what data it applies to); you can find out who did it; and you can find out what day it was created.

This is a sort of reductio of my dissertation. The interface is nothing but people and times. I'm curious to see--as the work develops--how they analyze this information and what they find about that interface. However, it seems from their first pass that the users weren't working to subvert the system: they were pretty happy with indexing by this fairly sparse data.