Mail2Tag: Efficient Targeting of News in an Organization

Transferring information and news across the many boundaries found in a networked knowledge economy remains a challenge for work organizations. From field interviews studying news sharing in organizations we find that news proliferates through and within organizational boundaries along social networks, with people filtering for each other and according to their roles in the organization. We find that people actively target information at the perceived right people, but this is a hurried and incomplete assessment that arises frequently. We report here on a novel email-based news sharing system called Mail2Tag that uses tagging keywords as email addresses. We present the unique features supporting lightweight collaboration that extends the observed practices of news sharing in the enterprise. We conclude by considering how we can foster collective intelligence in an organization by making lightweight adaptations to current tools and information sharing practices. Author Keywords Social media, tagging, news, diffusion of innovation.