A step toward organizing information in the digital age

As the world moved toward everything digital, people had envision paperless for quite a while now.
To a large degree, for structured data, the world had made great stride. Databases and applications were created successfully to host those data and people everywhere are adopting those systems well.

The observation, however, is that for non-structured data, the adoption is somewhat of a slow processes in the making especially in the realm of organizing and using them.

For example, meeting notes, book notes, and class notes are a kind of un-structured data.


For the note taking industry, there is no shortage of note taking gadgets in the market, but most are just traditional note taking with gadgets.

In terms of organizing and using un-structured data, I would show two articles of interests:
  10 Ways to Improve How You Manage Information
    Which talked about how 'Information Management is a Hallmark of Better Productivity'
  Electronic Lab Notebooks
    where University of Cambridge is trying to help researcher to save/store their notes


At the University of Cambridge, they failed to recommend a single software for the University to adopt.

The meat of my suggestion is the use of a wiki-style system to organize notes or similarly un-structured data. Personally, I have used that systems for ages and, although not perfect, I found it is very useful.

Before I presented my wiki-style note system, let's step back and look at how people have been taking notes and how people have been organizing them.

In the cases of book notes or study notes, people/students wrote notes on papers with some kind of structure if they do choose. Once notes were taken, to organizing them, people can easily put related notes together in folders and filed into cabinet if they want by category or alphabetically.

In the cases of meeting notes or notes with similar natures, notes could be taken in similar fashion like the book note or study note, but the filing and organizing can certainly make differences. For example, a meeting may cover various topics/projects. In these cases, note taker may like to tear up the note so that he or she can file notes under the appropriate topic or project. However, if that is the case, this will tear-up the note of the meeting and it would be difficult to know the over all picture of the meeting.

The multi-topic nature of the meeting note isn't as unique as it may sound. For example, to file an article away, reader may notices that article covers two topics, like education and workforce. Filing the article under either the education folder or the workforce folder the reader risks the chance of finding that article the next time when he looking for it since he maybe looking in the wrong folder.


After reviewing few cases of how people dealing with paper notes, let's take a look at what a wiki system can do for us.

First of all, wiki is basically just a quick way to create linked web pages (read Wikipedia if you need to), where web pages are just like a Word document that you can type, you can highlight, and you can format, ...etc. The thing about wiki web pages, however, is that the linking is a second nature of wiki pages and creating a document is as easy as creating
a link.

When applying the wiki principle to the meeting note scenario, we could create, in each project page, a link to the meeting note page. In this way, all project page will aware of decisions made in that meeting while you have your meeting page intact. The other approach would be to cut and paste the meeting decision to each project page while create in the meeting page links that linked to each project page. In either case, you can always find those decisions no matter you follow the meeting page or the project page.

In the case of filing article away, you can easily create, in both the education page and the workforce page, links to the article page. In this way, you can always reach the article page no matter which way/page you choose.

When working on book notes or study notes, link can easily be created to a prerequisite knowledge page and can help the learning tremendously.

Filing or organizing information in wiki is great. But how about the presentation in terms of the 5 hats LATCH approach? In general, user can arrange pages in all five arrangements (Location, Alphabetically, Timeline, Category, and Hierarchically) manually at the same time since all we have are web pages and presentations would just be links to the pages. However, using selected approach for appropriate pages can make the presentation more logical.

Depend on implementation, some wiki system also handle pictures and files.


A retrospect:
Back to the time of folders and short file names, I would build folder hierarchy and try to store/organize files/information in a hierarchy way. With the short file name, I constantly have to create a text file: _ReadMe.txt to define and describe the content of the folder. With the introduction of Windows' 95, the _ReadMe.txt file can actually be a web page that provides links and description of the folder. With the shortcut of the file system, the folder web pages provide a fair information organization system. At the time, I did not try to see if it is possible to link folder pages. But, as you can see, the idea is very close to what I have today with the wiki web pages - Using web page with links to document/organize your information.

A project at Kickstarter.com:
Always-Organizer