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We anticipate
that the possibility to set guarantees of existence will influence
online collaboration in several ways.
A major effect
will concern project managers who will be required to develop a
concept dealing with the usage of information created during the
communication process even before the project actually starts.
Precisely because guaranteed availability is connected with costs,
one has to ask questions like How long should some specific piece
of information be available?, What should be communicated
externally?, What different kinds of information are there
(e.g. process, topic, legal information)?.
Even project
members will start to reflect on how their contributions should be
treated. We have made the experience that these questions are usually
discussed during or at the end, in both cases too late, of the
project. Due to the possibility to set guarantees of existence, it is
necessary to decide how information will be treated at the very
beginning of the project.
In addition,
project members or authors need to decide for each publication
whether it should be possible to delete it or whether the information
should be available until a certain point of time. The author
indicates to the readers how he or she values the published
information, whether he or she wants to dispose freely of the
information or issue a guarantee for the content. It is essential to
deliberate on the advantage of indicating the value of information
via a guarantee of existence and the question whether authority over
information should or can be given up. If others are allowed to
extend the guarantee of existence authority over the information
might be handed over completely. However, it clearly signals how
deeply an author is commited to the published information.
Authors can
certainly disregard the possibility of assigning guarantees of
existence. However, we assume that their articles will be less
appreciated as opposed to articles with guarantee of existence.
Then again, it
is not possible to provide each piece of information with a guarantee
of existence. In the course of project planning a budget is drawn up
and a decision is made to which extent guarantees can be set. Both
have a direct influence on the limitations of assets of project
members.
Readers also
benefit from information with guarantee of existence. The fact that a
reader can rely on the availability of information, might cause him
or her not to store the information. At present, the only possibility
and therefore common practice to document important
information which is available online is to store it on parallel
media (e.g. one's own hard drive, server) or even to print it out.
This is the only way to make information which should be included or
referenced in an article reliably available. As a result, information
is stored several times together with all arising problems such as
disk space, data security, copyright etc.
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