Harvesting, chaords and arbitrary order

I’m just tucking into to David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous. (I chose to start reading at the beginning by the way!). In the second chapter, on alphabetization, Weinberger talks about the arbitrariness of classification schemes for organizing knowledge. Everything ordered by human beings is done so arbitrarily, and no one scheme is going to capture exactly the right kind of order that needs to happens. This is why tagging is so important (and I confess to being a lax lately with tags. Perhaps this is a good time to change that practice).

“Knowledge is what happens when the joints of our ideas are the same as the joints of nature,” Weinberger writes. In the execution of a chaordic path, where groups and organizations are leaping to and fro between the poles of chaos and order as they find their way, harvesting knowledge must be useful to the endeavour. If the organization is evolving well, it is doing so in a natural way and so the knowledge that is being generated must be useful also in a natural way.
When I worked for government, the classification schemes we were required to use to file documents were so completely aribitrary that in three years I never filed a single thing, for fear that I would never be able to find it again. Instead, I kept files in my office, most often in piles and binders relating to the work I was doing. Things were tagged by post it notes if they could exist in more than one pile. I needed my own scheme. Since 1999 I haven’t used a filing cabinet and in the last year I have gone completely paperless, depending instead on Google Desktop to find what I am looking for in my digital world.

This is nothing new, but it has major ramifications for harvesting. We want to be helpful as facilitators and create clusters for groups of people that seem to reflect patterns we are seeing. The problem of course is that any scheme developed by one person excludes the social reality of the group. And so lately, I have been turning over classification to groups of people and using post-its to tag things so that we can find them again later. As soon as possible getting a harvest into a taggable digital format is essential so that it can be remixed and used in innovative ways, reflecting the chaordic journey a group is on.

This is something to add to the Art of Harvesting materials we are working on.

[tags]David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous, tagging, chaordic, filing, knowledge management[/tags]