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they may need to reschedule their work and annotate the shared workplan. In so
doing, these kinds of coordination mechanisms are considered to be tangible, pro-
viding important representations of work and responsibility that can be changed
and updated as and when needed.

4.2.4 Designing collaborative technologies to support coordination
Shared calendars, electronic schedulers, project management tools, and workflow
tools that provide interactive forms of scheduling and planning are some of the
main kinds of collaborative technologies that have been developed to support
coordination. A specific mechanism that has been implemented is the use of con-
ventions. For example, a shared workspace system (called POLITeam) that sup-
ported email and document sharing to allow politicians to work together at
different sites introduced a range of conventions. These included how folders and
files should be organized in the shared workspace. Interestingly, when the system
was used in practice, it was found that the conventions were often violated (Mark,
et al., 1997). For example, one convention that was set up was that users should
always type in the code of a file when they were using it. In practice, very few peo-
ple did this, as pointed out by an administrator: "They don't type in the right
code. I must correct them. I must sort the documents into the right archive. And
that's annoying".
The tendency of people not to follow conventions can be due to a number of
reasons. If following conventions requires additional work that is extraneous to the
users' ongoing work, they may find it gets in the way. They may also perceive the
convention as an unnecessary burden and "forget" to follow it all the time. Such
"productive laziness" (Rogers, 1993) is quite common. A simple analogy to every-
day life is forgetting to put the top back on the toothpaste tube: it is a very simple
convention to follow and yet we are all guilty sometimes (or even all the time) of
not doing this. While such actions may only take a tiny bit of effort, people often
don't do them because they perceive them as tedious and unnecessary. However,
the consequence of not doing them can cause grief to others.
When designing coordination mechanisms it is important to consider how so-
cially acceptable they are to people. Failure to do so can result in the users not
using the system in the way intended or simply abandoning it. A key part is getting
the right balance between human coordination and system coordination. Too much
system control and the users will rebel. Too little control and the system breaks
down. Consider the example of file locking, which is a form of concurrency control.
This is used by most shared applications (e.g., shared authoring tools, file-sharing
systems) to prevent users from clashing when trying to work on the same part of a
shared document or file at the same time. With file locking, whenever someone is
working on a file or part of it, it becomes inaccessible to others. Information about
who is using the file and for how long may be made available to the other users, to
show why they can't work on a particular file. When file-locking mechanisms are
used in this way, however, they are often considered too rigid as a form of coordi-
nation, primarily because they don't let other users negotiate with the first user
about when they can have access to the locked file.