Boundary objects help people with different interests work together on a common goal.
Originally described in "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations', and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939 
", Star and Griesemer, 1989.
1. People collaborating on projects can be divided into groups (“Social Worlds”, in the jargon). Think of testers and programmers on a software project.
2. Those groups have different values, goals, ways of looking at their jobs. Yet they are collaborating to accomplish one single thing in the world.
3. One way to organize collaboration is to highlight certain words or things – those are the boundary objects, so-called because they lie at the boundaries between social worlds.
4. These boundary objects are a bit delicate because they have to accomplish two things at once. When people from different social worlds talk about a boundary object with each other, they have to agree that they’re talking about the same thing, yet… The different interpretations they give to that word have to be flexible enough that they don’t cause arguments, wasted time, and so on.
Boundary objects harness humanity’s obsession with “thingness” to create focuses of attention that people coordinate around, even though they disagree somewhat about what those things *are* and what they *mean*.
Boundary Objects are related to two later ideas, Trading Zones and Packages.