The work is its maker’s alone, and it now needs others inside it. Handing copies around forks it; opening everything to everyone destroys the freedom to work rough. Sharing is the explicit act at the boundary: named others are let in at a graded capability — view, comment, edit — before any joint mechanism exists.
The grant is the first collaboration decision, not a detail of storage. Every surveyed shipping product stages it the same way: new work defaults to private, the share act names people (or a container’s membership) at a tier, tiers inherit downward, and nobody grants above what they hold. A viewer can be offered a request path to the higher tier, which keeps the boundary explicit in both directions.
Forces
- Reach vs roughness: the more people the grant admits, the less freely the maker explores in front of them.
- Fine grants vs common ground: permissions cut too fine leave collaborators unable to see the same thing, and the conversation falls back to screenshots.
Consequences
- the grant names a capability tier, not just a person — viewer, commenter, editor — and every tier above viewing is a promise: granting comment access promises a commenting surface, granting edit access promises everything an editor collides with
- grants inherit and cap: a container's grant flows down to what it holds, and nobody grants above what they themselves hold — so the sharing model is also the shape of the space
- once anyone besides the maker can see the document, what unfinished work shows stops being an accident: the boundary between working and showing has to be declared, and a boundary declared distinct needs its crossing built
- participants granted into one document behind separate screens can see everything except each other; the grant creates the awareness debt presence pays
Resources & references
- Google Workspace: Restricted default sharing and graded roles
- Figma: sharing and permissions guide — inheritance and the grant cap
- Burghardt (2009) Working Through Screens, C5 “Permissions and views tailored to workers’ identities”, B7 “Object ownership and availability rules”
Appears in
Working on the same thing
- Sharing the work, step 1 — Share the work with named people
Related patterns
Precedes
- Draft and publish — once anyone besides the maker can see the document, what unfinished work shows stops being an accident: the boundary between working and showing has to be declared, and a boundary declared distinct needs its crossing built
- Presence — participants granted into one document behind separate screens can see everything except each other; the grant creates the awareness debt presence pays
Enacts
- Privacy — the grant is the privacy boundary made explicit and graded, rather than implied by where a file happens to live
Complements
- Workspace — the workspace partitions the actor's contexts; sharing decides who else is inside one