Method

Methodology used in the “Keep Found Things Found” (KFTF) project to study how people organize project-related information were provided by Wiliam Jones, and were used in modified form to collect data for this study.

Seven participants were observed during a period of twelve weeks working on current projects to show how they structure encountered information, and how these structures changes over time. The study consisted of seven sessions with each participant, divided into introductory sessions (to get the participants general usage with information to know, and to find and be introduced to a suitable project to observe), intervening sessions (to observe changes in structure of their information collections concerning the selected project), and final sessions (to wrap up, and to compare results with a chosen back-up project to avoid tempering findings).

The observed projects were either work-related or study-related or private, and varied from small to huge projects, had moderate to sophisticated difficulties, and familiarity of the participants varied from familiar to unknown.
Planing a wedding, developing a web site, introduce a new product to a new market, and writing a research thesis are some examples of the observed projects.

why PIM4U?

Don't let me think so much about the name. PIM was already taken, so PIM4U it is.
PIM stands for Personal Information Management, and this blog will wrap up my previous research on Personal Information Management, and will be continued with upcoming research.

Personal Information Management is a sub-discipline of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and tries to find answers to the problem of managing information in all kinds of information like mails, bookmarks, documents, and so on (all digital, and paper-based, and called Personal Information Collection).--A rough description can be find at Wikipedia.

My studies tries to reflect the way, people handling information they encounter during working on a project. Those people I observed worked in private, work-related, or university-based projects, and it seems to be, that there are three different approaches to handle the today's complexity of incoming information.

Different people not only have different strategies to organize information they encounter during a project, but also have different strategies to keep their organizations up to date. The project-related Personal Information Collections can be created in advance or grow over time during a project. The structure can represent the project itself, or be created in ad-hoc decisions
and gives no clues about the project itself for other people. Messy people created a way to get unused information out of their view by moving them away, or changing the current work folder.

To understand how and why it is, how it is, could be interesting for some people, researching in the same field of Computer Science, but since I decided to call this blog PIM4U (in an ad-hoc decision, as I mentioned above), I will try to write my posts in a way, that even interested people without any background can understand and get benefit for themselves from the results of my studies.