Mapmail: Restructuring an Email Client for Use in Distributed Teams

Keywords:

Information sharing, communication, collaboration,distributed teams, email, repurposing, application, surrogacy

Abstract:

In this paper we examine a solution for coping with information sharing across location, time zone, and organizational boundaries. Email, a principal tool for such collaboration, relies on textual and/or numeric sorting, filtering and presentation by subject, data, sender addresses and/or time. Typically, spatial properties of presentation are limited to filtering incoming messages into folders. We have been designing for a different form of social expressiveness – mapping email by geographic region. We describe an example of how an email client was extended, preserving its original familiarity and functions, but augmented with new features expressed in a spatial map arrangement. We describe how this approach exemplifies a general technique we call “application surrogates”. We discuss application surrogates in terms of emerging “mashup” approaches to application development.

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• p2591-nelson.pdf