Facibus Reviews

Permaculture is a system of sustainable agriculture. My late father was a big fan of it, and I’ve designed my own gardens along permaculture principles in the past. Two of the principles that apply themselves nicely to information architecture and information management are:

• Rarely use one thing for one purpose alone
• Think holistically: look at everything as part of the system

Imagine a fence dividing your chook (chicken) pen from your orchard in a suburban back yard. You grow beans and other edible creepers along the fence. The creepers get a little overgrown so that the chooks can use them for shelter. You eat the chooks and the eggs they produce. You eat the beans. You use the manure they produce in the compost that feeds the next generation of beans. The chooks go into different yards that contain the vegetable beds lying fallow for next year. You supply the chook-feeding and -watering labor. Everything feeds everything else. Everything contributes, and everything benefits. It is one big holistic system, and fractally expands in scope to include every energy transaction on the whole planet.

How does this apply to information and to Information Architecture? Think of a small closed information system, like an spreadsheet sitting on a thumbdrive. It is perfect, and wonderful, and there are hundreds of millions of such little spreadsheets like it on thumbdrives all over the world. To be of any use to more than just the originator (even to the originator in the longer term), it needs to be shared - that is, it needs to be part of a system.

To form a useful part of that system, the spreadsheet needs to be updateable, mergeable and findable. Without access to the data, and the attachment of meaningful context, it will never make the jump to being information, and beyond it, knowledge.

Dan Saffer wrote:

The biggest leap forward in computing came when the designers and engineers at Xerox PARC stopped thinking about the computer in this way and instead started thinking about it instead as a communication device. And we’ve seen what this led to: email, networks, the internet. The network is the computer now, and if you don’t believe me, do what I did a few weeks ago and unplug from the internet for a few days and watch yourself squirm.

I agree. Without effective sharing, whatever is created is lost.

So what do we do about it? At CeBIT Australia’s eGovernment conference I learnt that the Queensland government has done an information audit and determined that 85% of government documents can be covered by Creative Commons licensing - in effect they are saying that a large proportion of their information is publicly releasable. For a government to admit this is pretty remarkable - they are shifting from a “tell ‘em nothing unless they plead for it” paradigm to a “unless there are security/privacy/commercial sensitivity reasons, let’s give them everything” mindview.

Sounds very new-age, but I believe that Information Management is changing, slowly but surely, to concentrate more on effective dissemination than control. Time will tell.