The Nature of Information – A Workshop Report

This opportunity to meet with information professionals discussing future fields of information development took place in lovely and appropriate surroundings.
The 8th Social Study of ICT workshop (SSIT8) at LSE on 25th April was a well-attended event that concentrated on the problems of the relationships of information to data, and the real-world treatment of the mass of information and data which both information professionals and companies are expected to deal with on a daily (if not moment-to-moment) basis.

After an inspirational keynote speech by Albert Borgmann, the events that followed were a pattern of talks and panel sessions where all speakers were able to offer new facets on our interpretations of the ‘Organizational Consequences of Information Growth’ (Panel 1) and ‘Information, Memory and Culture’ (Panel 2). The latter was a lively and comprehensive conclusion to the day.

Definitive highlights were John Gantz’s informative and descriptive report on ‘The Expanding Information Universe’ – a report which should be read by anyone intent on proving to their CEO that email storage space isn’t quite as simple as we can believe – the concept of calculating the impact of an email should have prompted everyone to reconsider their email strategy.

Lev Manovich’s impressive presentation on visual digital culture described another facet of information whilst impressing upon us the potential of a graphically evaluated technological culture, the benefits, and the rich potential of such evaluation.

Other notable points were the well-reasoned panel presentations of Mireille Hildebrandt on data mining in the terms of the law, and Jannis Kallinikos’ part-allegorical and meta-hypertextual exploration of ‘Living in Ephemeria’.

It is to be hoped that by the amount of serious networking during the conference there is a follow-up to this event next year, that is assuming our capacity for information hasn’t exceeded our memory of how vital a resource information is to our fellow professionals.

Keep everything?

In my opening introduction at our Witness Conference on the challenges of managing email, I quoted from an article by Adam Gifford (New Zealand Herald, 14 March 2007): “emails can’t be thrown away.” Email ‘archiving’ software is often marketed on the fact that retention of email doesn’t need to managed closely, that everything can easily be retained and, importantly, easily retrieved. But I asked (rhetorically) “surely I’m not the only person here who has trouble with the concept of needing to keep all emails for legal or any other purposes?”

In a later seminar the notion of ‘keeping everything’ was raised and lead to some real debate.

What are the arguments for keeping all emails vs managing their retention according to value, record series etc? What are the benefits and the risks? Which approach do you support and why?

Subject categorisation of posts

Posts made to the blog will be given one or more labels (keywords). Copies of the posts are organised under these labels on the side panel so readers can look for posts on given themes.

The labels we will be using comprise, in A/Z order:

• AC⁺erm project – project management and development specific information
• Approaches – e.g. lifecycle; continuum; integration; embedded
• Architecture – e.g. definition of ‘architecture; infrastructure (policies, standards and practices, systems and technologies, human resources)
• Business Processes – e.g. understanding of business processes; business process mapping and record keeping requirements; functional analysis; role of business classification schemes and taxonomies
• ERM – covering items of broader interest and/or wider scope
• Methodology – discussion of the methodologies we’re using on this project; other researchers’ methodological approaches to studying ERM
• Partnerships – e.g. building partnerships for effective ERM: between stakeholder groups, transdisciplinary
• Progress – e.g. transition from theory to practice; where are we with the development of ERM?; drivers, barriers and culture; change management; accelerating the pace of change; implementation of / innovation in system and service development
• Risk – what are the risks? risk management related to ERM
• Technology – e.g. principles of design underpinning effective RM technology and systems; impact of new technology e.g. mobile communications
• Vision – e.g. philosophy; paradigms; theory; principles

Sue