Jonathan Riehl on Digitising More than Organisational DNA

I’ve been a fan of, and a subscriber to, FirstMonday for as long as I can remember being able to subscribe to anything electronically. In fact, I think it was my first-ever electronic sign-up, probably sometime in 1997, confirmed by looking at the fossil record of the e-mail address I used to register :-)

If you don’t already receive FirstMonday, I can only recommend you do. It was the journal that first made me think that blogging was the opensourcing of ideas….

Today was the day I got my July issue, and it gave me the chance to re-read Jonathan Riehl’s Digitising More Than Organisational DNA. It’s a must-read.

If we want to understand the power of the web in the context of information (as opposed to communities and networks) then it is important to understand what Jonathan writes. His synthesis of concepts ranging from Descartes to Vannevar Bush through to Tim Berners-Lee and Ward Cunningham is essential to anyone who wants to understand information in today’s context.

I just love the Explicit Decentralised and Named versus Implicit Centralised and Enumerated method of framing what the issues are.

It is in this context that we can best understand the implications for identity, for permissioning, for authentication. It is in this context that we can perceive the pain of Polluted Paths and the waste that is created by such Polluted Paths.

Let me know what you think

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