Ten Requirements for Achieving Collaboration #7: Tracking the Change and Evolution of Information
We are in the midst of a series investigating collaboration. We previously wrote about the two types of collaboration - intentional and accidental.
INTENTIONAL: where we get together to achieve a goal and
ACCIDENTAL: where you interact with something of mine and I am never aware of your interaction
While intentional collaboration is good it is not where the bulk of untapped collaborative potential lies. Accidental collaboration is. But the challenge is to intentionally facilitate accidental collaboration. For the full list of 10 requirements see the original post. Last time I wrote about requirement #6: Data Accessibility for People and Computers. This time we will talk about the importance of keeping track of how the information changes over time.
No information systems are static. Information is continuously being added, removed and changed in the systems. Even records and governance systems that provide "immutable storage" for information assets are not static when considered from the system view. Accessing the system changes it. If nothing else, a new access record is logged. In many ways such feedback intensive systems are intrinsic to the human experience. It is no wonder that these cybernetic characteristics penetrate our information systems. But we still need to take advantage of them.
Consider the simple access log example. We do not merely access the system, we access some information in the system. When we track what item was accessed and graph those accesses over time it changes the information in the context of the system. While the binary information object itself may not be altered, the pattern of access over time yields valuable information. It lets us know that the item is popular, important or unpopular or unimportant.
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