Richard Filing

I recently remembered this Fast Company interview from 1999 and didn’t want to lose it again
Excerpt: Freeman Thomas has designed two of the most distinctive cars of the ’90s. He is codesigner of VW’s New Beetle. He also designed the Audi TT — a sports car of such purity that a New York Times critic called it “historically significant” and nominated it for “car of the century.”
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/30/thomas.html

 From the e-gineer blog ”In 2006, Janssen-Cilag completely replaced our simple, static HTML intranet with a Wiki solution. Over the 16 months since launch, it has dramatically transformed our internal communication and continues to increase in both visits and content contributions each month.

Janssen-Cilag’s previous intranet, InfoDownUnder, was a static HTML site, originally developed in 2001. Content was maintained using FrontPage, with only a handful of active editors throughout the company. IT was involved only to upload latest versions of content files from the development site onto the production server.

While some areas were lovingly maintained to a high standard, large sections of content were out of date. There was no search capability. Trust in the information was very low. News was distributed via email, not the web.”

Over on Vitamin - Robert Hoekman has posted a great template and ‘how to’ for a powerpoint slide deck that shows detailed use cases alongside wireframes or comps in an effort to detail all the interactions in a design.
Excerpt: The Design Description Document cures all of this. First, it communicates to the boss how each interaction will occur, so he has no questions. Second, it tells the developers exactly how things need to work so they know what to build and can immediately start cranking it out. Third, it gives the Documentation team something they can start writing about sooner than later. After all, if the developers know exactly how everything needs to work, odds are much better that the final product will be in line with the original design.

User generated taxonomy using tags (freely chosen keywords).
Attributed to Thomas Vander Wal.

Folksonomy in the enterprise
Since folksonomies are user-generated and therefore inexpensive to implement, advocates of folksonomy believe that it provides a useful low-cost alternative to more traditional, institutionally supported taxonomies or controlled vocabularies. An employee-generated folksonomy could therefore be seen as an “emergent enterprise taxonomy”. Some folksonomy advocates believe that it is useful in facilitating workplace democracy and the distribution of management tasks among people actually doing the work.

However, workplace democracy is also seen as a utopian concept at odds with the governing reality of the enterprise, the majority of which exist and thrive as hierarchically-structured corporations not especially aligned to democratically informed governance and decision-making. Also, as a distribution method, the folksonomy may, indeed, facilitate workflow, but it does not guarantee that the information worker will tag and, then, tag consistently, in an unbiased way, and without intentional malice directed at the enterprise.

from Wikipedia’s folksonomy reference

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users create emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon’s recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes.

People are creating content and data.
These people benefit from their actions.
Other people benefit from their actions.