KenManheimer

My "Organizing Content" Motives

The abilty to manage content through the network - not just to view it, but to edit and organize it in collaboration - is not entirely a new thing. It's new enough, though, that we don't yet really know how to do it well. In fact, it's new enough that we don't quite know what well means. Managed content opens the door for profoundly extending the scope and immediacy of collaboration enourmously. The trick will be to realize these capabilities without being overwhelmed by the enourmous scale of collaboration made possible by the new technologies.

This is the basis of my interest in organizing content - finding scalable ways to collect and arrange content such that stuff is suitably connected with other stuff, naturally findable rather than being lost in a deluge.

Some questions are:

How do you arrange stuff so that it is findable, assocated with related stuff?
How do you help visitors keep oriented, in the midst of enourmous amounts, types, and incessantly changing content collections?

In general, computers offer virtually unbounded capacity for collecting and linking things together - the trick is in making the links meaningful.

How do you arrange for all this without discouraging contributions by authors (and by visitors, when harvesting information from their activities) by impeding them, eg to collect classifications, links, other metadata?

KLMScalingOrganization is one stab i've taken at compiling a bunch of measures/approaches for addressing these questions.

My CMF.zope.org spiels (moved from there):

In general, i'm framing my efforts in terms of Zope applications - not only is it my job, but it's intentionally very versatile, and, i think, directed towards dealing with just these sorts of things. (See http://www.zope.org/Members/klm/WhatIsZope for my take on zope's essential features...)

In particular, i'll be working on developing the Zope Content Management Framework (CMF, formerly known as the PTK - http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK ), with some of these concerns in mind. To some degree, the framework constitutes of a sea of content with common features like DublinCore metadata classification and inclusion in a comprehensive, full-text and classification index, the portal catalog. A fundamental feature i'm currently aiming to design is explicit collections of different types of associations between items in the portal - "Organization Objects" - i have the early stages of a proposal at http://dev.zope.org/Products/PTK/ZWiki/OrganizationObjects

(This idea is referred to in the Maintain page associations bullet of the KLMScalingOrganization document.)