PIM 2024: The Information We Need, When We Need It...As We Get Ever Closer, Is this Ideal Still Ideal?


Thursday, March 14, 2024 @CHIIR2024 | Halifax Hall, Sheffield, UK

Deadline for submission: Monday, February 26, 2024

Submit via EasyChair

An oft-repeated ideal of personal information management (PIM) is to have “the right information, at the right time, in the right place...” for the current need. But the technologies and innovations that bring us ever closer to this ideal carry costs as well as benefits. In this ninth in a series of PIM workshops, we give closer, critical consideration to the “right time, right place” ideal of PIM. Can we manage the potential downsides involved in achieving this ideal, while preserving its obvious benefits? Or should we revise our ideal of PIM? Past PIM workshops have been offered in association with re- lated conferences including CHI, CSCW, SIGIR and ASIS&T. This is the first time the PIM workshop is offered in association with CHIIR. The workshop theme engages each of the topics listed in the CHIIRCFP.

Given the timeliness and importance of the theme for PIM 2024, we expect several papers to follow. In addition, we expect a report, authored by all workshop participants, to follow from the workshopitself.

Organizers


Dates

  • Monday, February 26, 2024. Deadline for submission of position statement via EasyChair (You may submit earlier for earlier feedback & notification).
  • Wednesday, February 28, 2024. Notification
  • Wednesday, February 28, 2024 to Wednesday, March 13, 2024. Extended online discussion in preparation for the workshop and to include participants who cannot attend the in-person workshop.
  • Sunday, March 10, 2024. Bio slide and (optional) full paper due for upload to the workshop website.
  • Thursday, March 14, 2024. Day of in-person workshop

Objectives

For all the good in a world closer to an ideal of PIM, we need also to consider the not-so-good. For example:

  • Could increasing reliance on the retrieval of external information (vs. remembrance of “knowledge in the head”) lead to a diminishment in our brain’s “muscle” for remembrance?
  • Does an increasing readiness to accept suggested comple-tions (in search terms, in prose) cause us to overlook better search terms, better expressions?
  • And, in a time of ChatGPT, people are not only accepting suggested completions to search terms or prose phrases but also to entire drafts (e.g., of business reports) even though the information within may sometimes be misleading or inaccurate. The potential of our tools to impact our language (and even our thinking) extends back to the widespread adoption of the QWERTY keyboard. As the accessibility, ease of use and perceived utility of our information tools continues to improve, are we sleepwalking towards a “Newspeak” dystopia?
  • Of more near-term concern are issues of privacy and security that arise in circumstances where our tools – our web browser, our email client, our search service – are keeping sensitive information about us including credit card numbers and search preferences.
  • And then are the problems arising from the many pop-ups, notifications, alerts, and other incoming information. Even when the intention may be to help us towards the ideal of PIM, the outcome may be negative instead – we’re distracted; our attention span is shortened.

From the workshop will follow an article reviewing the state of our knowledge with respect to the use of information and information tools in successful aging and serving as a call to action towards further research and development.

Submission


We aim to engage even those who can’t attend the in-person workshop itself, but who are doing relevant work, in an online, asynchronous, pre-workshop discussion, during which contributions can help shape the format and discussion of the workshop itself. All participants, online and in-person, are also invited to contribute to the post-workshop article and to submit a paper for inclusion on the workshop website.

All who are interested in participating (online or in-person), should submit a one- to two-thousand-word position statement via EasyChair (1-to 4-page, excluding references, preferably in APA format, written in English, PDF or MS Word) describing their position and work they are doing as this relates to the workshop theme and objectives. Brevity is encouraged! Please DO NOT anonymize. Please also indicate whether you are able to participate in the in-person workshop or only the online discussion.


Those accepted are expected to:

  • Provide a "bio slide" (4:3) as a PDF file. The slide should describe your background, your recent/current research as this relates to the workshop theme and (optional) include a recent picture of you.
  • Participate (at least 1 hour of time) in an extended online, asynchronous, pre-workshop discussion designed to elicit/elaborate on key issues and areas -- the better to use the limited time of the in-person workshop itself.
  • (Optional) Provide a full paper (approx. 10 pages) for inclusion on the workshop website.

Those who plan to attend in-person are also expected to:

  • Register for the workshop via ACM CHIIR 2024. Registration for the full CHIIR 2024 Annual Meeting is optional.

Participants

All participants of PIM 2024 and their accepted position statements will be listed below:

Schedule

We encourage participants to bring their laptops or tablets to the in-person workshop for easy access to the shared online documents (e.g., Google Drive) in support of workshop discussions.

  • 09:00 AM: Welcome and Introductions.
  • 09:40 AM: Talk and Discussion – relating to key issues of the PIM ideal and supporting technologies as described in the extended abstract for the PIM workshop. Are we getting closer to the ideal? How measured? At what costs?.
  • 10:30 AM: Welcome and Introductions.
  • 10:45 AM: Shift into the breakout groups Focus in the morning discussion is on the many changes -- large and obvious, smaller and more subtle -- in our speed and means of access to information to meet our current need. Participants are each encouraged to pick a time in their past, e.g., when in graduate school or at a first job, and then to compare and contrast with the present. What has changed? What endures?.
  • 12:00 PM: Breakout groups converge and report (10 minutes/group), on observations and findings. General discussion ensues.
  • 01:00 PM: Participants return to their breakout groups for lunch and discussion now focused on a future 10 years from now. Extrapolating from trends identified in the morning's discussion, what can we expect in the future? Each team prepares a presentation describing utopian and dystopian visions of the future – and then describing what might be done, through research and advocacy, to realize the former and avoid the latter.
  • 03:00 PM: Break.
  • 03:15 PM: Groups converge for presentations, 15 minutes per group, and then general discussion with the aim of generating a draft workshop report. In the spirit of friendly competition, groups will compete with one another for prizes of little or no monetary value (but fun to give and receive).
  • 05:00 PM: Wrap-up and next steps. Discussion continued in the aftermath of PIM 2022 well into 2023 as facilitated by a "PIM 2022 and beyond" distribution list and we expect the comparable for PIM 2024.
  • [Optional] 05:30 PM: Discuss updates to the Wikipedia article on PIM.
  • [Optional] 07:00 PM: Those who are interested can gather for dinner.