The Difference Between Legal Control and Material Control - Coordination of Access Rights in Shared Workspaces

Abstract

Research purpose. Modern work is increasingly taking place in temporary workgroups embedded in decentralized work environments that transcend organizational boundaries. The first implementations of the shared workspace idea emerged in the 1990s in the CSCW research area and are now firmly integrated into the working world with systems such as Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. However, when it comes to accessing documents, problems arise in terms of coordinating access to documents. Who can access the documents, modify them, and upload them back to the shared workspace? It should be noted that concurrent changes can lead to inconsistencies. Furthermore, incorrect changes to the content of documents can have economic and legal consequences. Who is responsible for this? Strict access control can avoid this problem if necessary. However, it contradicts the approach of agile cooperation, which benefits, among other things, from access to documents that is not restricted in terms of time and place.

Keywords

• shared workspaces
• access coordination
• conflict resolution
• m15