SIGDOC Newsletter
March 2007
:: Volume 8, Number 1
Interesting Items
Lifestreaming: A Trend of Pervasive Work Documentation by Clay Spinuzzi
Lifestreaming: A Trend of Pervasive Work Documentation
In 1995, two Yale researchers named Eric Freeman and David Gelernter
began publishing a series of papers about a new metaphor for computer
interfaces: Lifestreams. The idea was that the desktop metaphor was too
static and limited for the enormous number of documents and other files
that users were creating. Instead, Freeman and Gelernter suggested, the
interface should show these documents as lifestreams, time-ordered series
of documents that could be reviewed in order or split into substreams.
The lifestreams concept never quite took off as an interface metaphor,
and we still work primarily with the desktop metaphor (although desktop
search has changed the landscape somewhat). But the concept of lifestreaming
has come back around again, this time on the Internet, where it's much
harder to organize one's many traces and where a stream architecture
-- RSS -- is in broad use.
The rationale is that we're online so much, and logging so much of our
existence via separate services, that we should be able to compile a
timestamped record of our online existence. And since that existence
intersects heavily with offline existence, we can do all sorts of autotracking,
providing a second memory of our activities. As web developer Jeremy
Keith explains, "Just about every time somebody publishes something
on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn't it be nice to pull in all
these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline
of online activity?"
And people have. Emily Chang, principal of web consultancy Ideacodes
and creator of eHub, describes it this way:
For now, this activity stream idea is providing the start to a holistic
view of my activity across online networks: both my own and the ones
I use. In turn, this acts as a conduit for you, the reader. Rather
than just a static "recommended links" page or a blogroll,
the data stream opens up my activity to you in semi-realtime and at
one website.
In this incarnation, lifestreaming looks a lot like Freeman and Gelernter's
original implementation. But the key difference is that lifestreams
(or activity streams or datastreams) are also directed outward and shared,
providing awareness for others rather than a closed record for oneself.
This shift seems like a natural progression in the context of net work,
in which barriers between work, social, and civic lives tend to fall
and in which constant collaboration and communication become necessary
for sustaining the sorts of boundary-spanning we have to do. For instance, Chang runs a web consultancy (among many other things)
and it makes sense that clients, contractors, vendors, etc. know what
she's up to. So tracking her location on Plazes, seeing her social chatter
on Twitter, and viewing her planned events on Upcoming -- all in one
place -- seems like a tremendous resource. Furthermore, a lifestream
like this obviates the need for other sorts of time tracking for projects;
the data are all there, they just need to be tagged or otherwise characterized.
Another example is Thomas Vander Wahl's Off the Top, whose RSS feed
bundles all his activity on his various sites, such as his blog, Flickr,
and del.icio.us. Again, the idea is to pull all his online identities
together into a coherent time-ordered stream in order to share both the
activity history and the resources he creates.
More specialized types of lifestreaming have also emerged. For instance,
Web Worker Daily talks about the related phenomenon of workstreaming:
There is a web worker replacement for face time: workstreaming, the
publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues,
usually
via RSS but sometimes in other formats and ways.
Workstreaming is the
next generation of the 11 pm email you send to your team to show them
that you've been working all evening. Workstreaming
is related to lifestreaming, producing an RSS feed of all the bits
and pieces of your online self in date-time order. But lifestreaming
incorporates
everything from the personal to the professional to the trivial, while
workstreaming is only about showing what you've just accomplished,
what you're working on now, and what you're planning to do in the future.
We can see aspects of workstreaming in collaborative project management
and time management systems, but with the broad range of services able
to stream timestamped data, we can put together much more complete workstreams
than can be managed by any single program or system. Doing so would obviate
timesheets or time logs, and would provide us with accurate and relatively
complete searchable accounts of our work -- and would broadcast or narrowcast
our progress to others in our work teams, especially far-flung teams
working across geographical or organizational distances.
How is this going to affect designers of communication? In three ways:
- First, we may find ourselves using lifestreams or workstreams
to demonstrate accountability, just as we now keep track of timesheets
and billable
hours.
- Second we may use lifestreams or workstreams to keep in contact
with team members, just as we now use email, project management systems,
or similar manual applications. Combined team lifestreams could create a
composite status check for teams.
- Third, we may use lifestreams
or workstreams for self-analysis or team analysis of work. Where
are we spending the most time? Where are
the bottlenecks in our work? By surfacing and documenting our work, we may
be able to visualize these issues more effectively.
On the other hand, lifestreaming entails privacy concerns -- to put
it mildly. Those who engage in lifestreaming or workstreaming are going
to have to learn new habits for limiting the information they make available
and for effectively representing their own work.
Unlike the original incarnation of lifestreaming, I suspect that this
incarnation will stick around a while. The team/collaborative aspect
makes it too valuable not to leverage, particularly in the sorts of networked,
cross-organizational collaboration that characterizes knowledge work.
Clay Spinuzzi
Associate Professor
Director, Computer Writing and Research Lab
University of Texas at Austin
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