Klaudia Çarçani and Harald Holone participated in the 41st IRIS in Aarhus, Denmark and presented the following paper. Each year the best papers are chosen for publication in the proceedings of IRIS selected papers. The paper was among the IRIS selected and was published in the Association for Information Systems, AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) under Selected Papers of the IRIS, Issue Nr 9 (2018)
“Boundary Objects or Coordination Mechanisms?”
Boundary Objects (BOs) and Coordination Mechanisms (CMs) are terms with a long history in CSCW. They have both been used widely since their initial definition. We find the concepts used in the same settings to describe some form of cooperation among different peoples or group of people. Sometimes it seems that the choice of concepts has not been thought through. Thus, in this paper, we give a detailed description of both concepts, and then we discuss them side by side by highlighting six issues that researchers should take in consideration before defining an object as a coordination mechanism or a boundary object.