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Folders vs. Tags For Shared Email Accounts?
binarybum writes "I run a student organization with a 10-member 'board of directors.' We hardly ever all have time to attend meetings and a large part of how we interact with the student body is through email. We have a shared email account (accessible by the 10 of us on the board) right now that is typically accessed through an outlook web-access portal. We've been attempting to keep things organized in the account through a complex collection of folders that have been tacked on ad libum. It's turned into a complete mess. I have the onerous task of restructuring the folder system in hopes of achieving sustainable organization, but I'm wondering if I should just switch us over to a tagging system — perhaps Gmail. Has anyone used tags for a multi-user account successfully or does it end up being just as messy?"
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Why don't you just send a copy of every email sent to that address to each of the 10 members individuals addresses, and let each of them sort it anyway they want.
The only way it's going to work well is if no one uses the group account directly, but rather all of the email it receives is forwarded to the individual accounts of the members. Then each member can organize the mail however he or she sees fit.
Use both. Problem solved.
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This sounds like an ideal application for a Google or Yahoo groups account. You would have a private group for the board. All of the e-mail would be available in a central location, with individual messages accessible by search, and each board member could forward each mail to their own personal account or not, as they see fit.
With tags you can create arbitrary categories. So a "status" tag can be assigned to an email that already has a "report" tag but also to the one that has a "meetings" tag. In other words it is like being able to put the same object in two different folders.
One drawback of tags is, that it is harder to visualize. Google does a good job with searching but I can't think how you can visualize it (as a graph/hypergraph actually might work).
The other drawback is that people are more used to folder because they dealt with file systems before ("I'll make a folder for dates, then inside we'll split them by topic" kind of thinking).
Use a message board.
Personally, I like hierarchical organization over tagging. I think it's more natural to organize information this way and helps you to narrow down your subject faster. For example, I have a folder called work within which there is a folder for each project I work on. If I move an e-mail into just one of these project folders, I've already significantly narrowed things down.
Tagging on the other hand is just like having a folder a single level deep. One difference is that you can tag the same e-mail multiple times, but then, can you really be bothered to tag the same e-mail under multiple headings? That would be somewhat like copying your e-mail into multiple folders, an even greater hassle.
I'd suspect that google introduced tagging just because it's easier to tack on than hierarchical folder management.
Emails don't really fit into the folder structure very well because they might belong to several groupings at the same time, thus requiring multiple copies or shortcuts/links to an original (which most email programs don't do). Tags are definitely better for this since an email can have many tags at once.
Here's another idea you might, or might not, like:
Use GMail, or similar, for a group of accounts, one of which is the main, public address. This main account auto-forwards to the 10 member accounts, much like a list-serve. Replies from a member are CC'ed to the main account (set the rules right, or you could end up with an endless loop!!) and the 'Reply To:' field from the members is to the main account. This way, everybody gets everything, the group account is still the focal point, and everybody is responsible for keeping their own account organized.
If a single person is responsible for all of this (you?), you can set it up such that you are the one who can make changes to all the accounts and the others only have emailing privileges (but I haven't thought this part out and it may be difficult with some systems). One thing to consider if you use this is to either have an agreement (which some will break) or a setup that does not allow the users to use this account setup with out the CC'ing. This prevents them from using the account for personal or nefarious reasons.
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
I tend to agree: using tags, you're not limited to disjoint sets.
Intersections are quite common in real life, and designing the perfect category tree is not easy nor fast. Even when you succeed, you're always running the risk of being confronted with a new item that doesn't fit in your tree, or would need a complete tree redesign to fit in well (see biology).
However, tag systems usually are "all-flat" (Gmail is anyway): there is no notion of sub-category.
If you're going to have dozens of tags, this is going to be messy too...
Look into google groups. Each user can decide what to do with new messages, including forwarding messages to their own accounts.
Until I thought about the ability to have multiple tags on an item. Essentially, with tagging you have the full power of set arithmetic. A hierarchical scheme can be considered a strict subset. If you have INBOX, with a subfolder called 'Bank', and a subfolder called 'Credit', you can acheive the same thing by tagging the same message both 'bank' and 'credit'. The 'subfolder' would now represent the set intersection of the two tags. True, all your groups are visiibile from the top level, but a UI could none the less have a drill-down with set notation and acheive the same effect as hierarchical organization.
So tagging can have that power, it's a matter of UI design to make it as convenient.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
(Actually I agree with other posters who say this is just a normal application for an email list, let people do whatever they want, but the OP ruled that out?)
... because the are always the most valuable.
Currently, I'm completely unclear as to what kind of information you are attempting to organize here.
You imply you communicate with each other via e-mail, you say you communicate with the student body via e-mail. Fine, so what exactly is the purpose of these myriad nested folders? What is the organizational problem you are trying to solve?
There is absolutely no reason to share emails in this organization.
The secretary's job is not just the completion of the minutes. But to organize and forward on information that is required for the board. Information that is supposed to represent the boards point of view should go through the same single point.
Ad hoc access to, filtering of, replying to and otherwise manipulating the email is broken. One of the symptoms of that brokenness is the problem you are seeing now.
Fix the culture, the rest will follow.
I also manage e-communication at a university for a large student group (13-person exec board & 40+ non-exec members). Each exec member has his own committee to communicate with as well as the entire exec board. This year my university adopted Google Apps, and most of our members had Google accounts anyway. So we had each exec member use either their own personal Google account or a university google account. All e-mails or organized privately by each individual in his own account. Google Docs is where we do most of our collaboration. This means that there's no work for me to keep each person organized because that's his own responsibility, and people have the freedom to organize their tags or folders as they please. I don't even have to manage sharing rights--each exec member chooses with whom to share all his own Google Docs documents and spreadsheets.
The point: I highly recommend going with Google: Gmail+chat, Google Docs, Calendar, and Google groups (which I use heavily in another student group). You could have your group e-mail automatically forward to each person, or you can have your group email be a Google Groups email address.
The major draw back of this approach: learning curve. Don't underestimate people's desire to keep doing things the way they've always done it. Just adopting a strategy doesn't solve the problem. it's not that people are lazy or dumb. They're just trying to manage their time efficiently. If you want to transition people to a new system, you have to work one-on-one with each person.
I agree with the parent. I think it's obvious that email isn't the ideal solution here. Scale this up even a little more (say 25 people) and it's obvious that a shared email account isn't the answer. A forum, as noted, might be appropriate or even looking into to other solutions like 37signal-esque stuffs like Basecamp and Backpackit, might work.
"tacked on ad libum."
This phrase bears to Latin the same relation that "el trucko" bears to Spanish.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
When accessing GMail via IMAP, it emulates folders by interpreting a '/' in the tag as the "directory separator". It gives you the flexibility of tags with the organization of folders, if you want it. However, the web interface doesn't do this. And, of course, it doesn't solve the problems others mention with consistent use.
It would make more sense to create a mailing list, and have emails sent to the list forwarded to all ten members. Then they could administer their folders as they see fit.
With 10 people on one email account, it's hardly surprising that it turned into a clusterfuck.
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And it's worth spending some time coming up with an initial set of tags. That, by the way, is taxonomy not ontology. Ontology is about modeling a wider range of relationships than the "is-a"/"has-a" that taxonomy covers.
If the users want to add more tags, that's fine. Closed-ended taxonomies are seldom worth a hit. Unless you're a good-sized enterprise, don't waste time trying to impose a taxonomy on your users. It's costly and requires a lot of process discipline to do right.
Multi-rooted hierarchical tagging works best-- but a "flat" scheme isn't bad either.
Oh, and it's a trivial exercise to create a virtual-folder view based on tags. You can implement it either from a central repository of metadata or by carrying the metadata on the individual mail messages.
Regardless, using folders without tags is generally a lousy solution. Look at all the different and generally piss-poor ways that people organize information on their desktops for an idea of how well that usually works.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Your setup is completely idiotic. A shared account is just begging to be abused, particularly in a student politics environment.
Email arrives, on an issue which incriminates a board member: "Oh gee, it's been deleted and nobody knows who did it or what it contained." Issue turns up at the local student meeting and details regarding why that dodgy contract was approved: "Golly, looks like that email was removed." Crazy stuff. Unless your cabal intentionally wants to make itself unaccountable, you need to fix that up pronto.
How? Set up a mailing list (using, for example, Mailman) and have it deliver mail to each board member's personal email address. This stuff is trivial for any junior systems administrator. How this got approved as a Slashdot question is a mystery.
My suggestion(which is what worked for me collaborating on my capstone project) is that each person gets a single folder with their name on it.And then tags will be used in the central workspace for any projects and also each individual is allowed to tag the emails in his/her own folder as they wish. This gives everyone their own workspace and allows them to organize that workspace how they like,while at the same time giving all a central workspace for ongoing collaborative projects. This also cuts down on arguing about layout as everyone gets their own little niche to set up as they please and you only have to get them to agree to a few common tags for the common workspace. Our common tags were IIRC "things we would like to have"
Anyway our system really helped us to get a handle on things while allowing each individual to organize his personal area to what suited him best. Oh,and when you have meetings a similar approach works well in real life. We had our area set up in a Round Robin configuration which allowed those of us with laptops to easily share them with the two that didn't while zinging ideas off each other and at the same time giving us a central area where one of us could go and stand when he wanted to present an idea to the group while having their undivided attention. But I guess it would all depend on your group dynamics so YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
With 10 people on one email account, it's hardly surprising that it turned into a clusterfuck.
Hear, hear!
Corporate emails at my work consist of endless top-posting after re-top-posting that must be read from the bottom to the top to make any sense of the mess. In the process, I need to skip over multiple re-inclusions of the same email, and not get annoyed that the entire mess mostly consists of disclaimers. LookOut seems to strongly encourage this technique of mis-communication.
"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant disclaimer."
"What is the disclaimer standing on?"
"But it's disclaimers all the way down!" (sorry Stephen Hawking.)
LookOut is what you do when you use OutLook.
Personally I think joint accounts are normally a terrible idea. They are extremely difficult to maintain since (supposedly) everyone is responsible. In my experience if everyone is supposed to be responsible then in reality no one is actually responsible. Tragedy of the commons applies here. Everyone trusts someone else will deal with it and it becomes a big old mess.
Firstly, what are you trying to do?
If it is "discussion between a group of people" then email is the wrong solution. That's what nttp was invented for - threaded discussions. Even a modern blog/bbs will do a better job.
Secondly, part the secretary's job is summarise and communicate the businesss and decisions of the board. And _sometimes_ the reasons for the decisions. If you can't write minutes, have a dedicated blog. With a printed hardcopy filed with your departmental/faculty secretary.
On that front, trusting Google with your records is like trusting Microsoft with your DRM' music.
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