CHOIR: A Chatbot-mediated Organizational Memory Leveraging Communication in University Research Labs
This addresses organizational memory challenges for university research labs, but it is incremental as it builds on existing chatbot and documentation methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of lost knowledge in university research lab communications by designing CHOIR, an LLM-based chatbot for organizational memory, which was deployed in four labs for a month, resulting in 107 questions asked and 38 document updates.
University research labs often rely on chat-based platforms for communication and project management, where valuable knowledge surfaces but is easily lost in message streams. Documentation can preserve knowledge, but it requires ongoing maintenance and is challenging to navigate. Drawing on formative interviews that revealed organizational memory challenges in labs, we designed CHOIR, an LLM-based chatbot that supports organizational memory through four key functions: document-grounded Q&A, Q&A sharing for follow-up discussion, knowledge extraction from conversations, and AI-assisted document updates. We deployed CHOIR in four research labs for one month (n=21), where the lab members asked 107 questions and lab directors updated documents 38 times in the organizational memory. Our findings reveal a privacy-awareness tension: questions were asked privately, limiting directors' visibility into documentation gaps. Students often avoided contribution due to challenges in generalizing personal experiences into universal documentation. We contribute design implications for privacy-preserving awareness and supporting context-specific knowledge documentation.