(If possible, I edit and re-read every bit of communication, every email and letter I send. Even trivial or routine emails, to my my wife, my children, my parents, a friend, I go over, trying to tighten the language, fix the grammar, and add a bit of humor or elegance or elegant humor, to make it more readable. I doubt anyone will ever publish my correspondence, but I get joy writing as if someday, someone might. I wrote the following email to an online collaboration specialist in the organization I work for about an online archiving and collaboration site I will be setting up for my office.)
Dear ____,
Thanks for sending this info. I’m looking forward to designing (collaboratively) a Desk Officer SharePoint site/template. I’m starting to write down the elements I think it would need. What I especially want is some help setting it up and making it look good. Also, I’d like to discuss issues of taxonomy and metadata. For example, is the particular document an action memo or a meeting request for a Principal? Actually, it’s both and maybe even fits another category or two. The puzzle: how to name and archive it so it’s not lost forever but easily findable now and by future generations of officers.
In my last office some considered me a SP power user. From scratch, I set up a site for collaborating on and storing documents. I remember creating one workpage for historic documents and another for current documents. Does that sentence suggest to you when I was educated? It illustrates what I call linear thinking, a pre-Internet construct. Throughout my education, kindergarten to Masters, I searched for books in libraries using card catalogues. I call how my children (raised in the online era) think, spherical. A single word or link can lead in many different directions, even on different planes. The problem with how I named those two pages: at some point, a current document becomes finished, instantly becoming historic. Like I was going to transfer that document from one “shelf” to another? Clearly, not a useful taxonomy.
I look forward to sitting down with you and whoever else it makes sense to include, and plan how to make this happen. It was nice meeting you last week and I look forward to seeing this project happen.
