Organize the Organization
ad infinitum
In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky discusses how the infrastructure of the Internet enables more
people to undertake certain actions, such as sharing information, collaborating to produce information, and
group mobilization. The term social media has come to describe, variously, these kinds of group-oriented
activities (such as blogging and tagging), the platforms that support such activities (including Flickr,
Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook), and the document genres that arise from the intersection of these
activities and platforms (tweets, folksonomies, user profiles and their associated lists of linked data, and so
on).
In his analysis, Shirky often refers to the amateurization of professions, noting how, for example, scribes
became unnecessary when the printing press was able to perform their functions faster and more
effectively. Shirky implies that information professionals, particularly librarians, may see their roles go the
way of scribes, as the Internet enables effective amateur publication, organization, and dissemination of
documents. The basic structure provided by Flickr, for example, enables amateur photographers not only to
publish documentation of Brooklyn’s Mermaid Parade, but common use of user-supplied tags
(“mermaidparade”) enables sufficient organization of these photos to ensure their effective distribution to
the public, without any need for either advance decision-making or post-hoc control by Flickr or any other
controlling institution.
Are we, as information professionals in general and classificationists in particular, on the back end of
history, sadly clinging to the remnants of gatekeeping power manifested through our grand organizational
schemes? Do we facilitate or restrict the flow of information, and are our activities useful or misguided (or,
in some measure, all of these)?
In this set of activities, we will:
1. Examine the descriptive and organizational structures that have arisen, via social media tools and
processes, around various sets of documents.
2. Characterize advantages and disadvantages of these structures.
3. Envision systems for organizing these document sets that maximize advantages and minimize
disadvantages.
Step one: Investigate organizational structures implemented through social media.
Time: 30 minutes.
We will split into four groups to each examine the document set (or sets) created around the following:
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The tag “Mermaid Parade” in Flickr.
The tag “Tsunami” in Flickr.
The following tags (individually) in Delicious:
o Web. 2.0
o Social media
o Folksonomy
o Taxonomy
The following tags (individually) in LibraryThing:
o Web 2.0
o Social media
o Folksonomy
o Taxonomy
In your examination, you might ask the following questions:
 Do I understand what defines the identity of this set of resources?
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Does the organizational structure (for example, the different ways that each item might be tagged,
ways of browsing the entire set, and so on) help me to understand similarities and differences (that
is, relationships) between items?
How can I browse the set?
How can I find specific items within the set?
Are the items described consistently? Is there semantic drift over time, situation, person?
Are multiple perspectives on the items represented? How are these identified? Is there a dialogue
between perspectives, a means of comparing, debating, and selecting between them?
Does the organizational structure facilitate an understanding of the documents? What is this
understanding? How is this understanding generated?
These questions are, of course, just ideas to get you started. In seeking answers, the types of structural
elements that you might examine include:
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Tag sets associated with individual items, and how these are displayed.
Additional metadata associated with individual items, such as titles, summaries, and user
comments.
Means of exploring relationships within the document set, such as tag clouds or automatically
generated clusters.
Additional document sets that intersect those being analyzed.
In your group, you can pursue this investigation together or undertake it individually and then compare
your findings as a group.
If you exhaust the potential of your document set (although you shouldn’t!), you can proceed to another
one and compare.
Step two: synthesize your findings.
Time: 15 minutes.
What does the system (or systems) that you analyzed do well? What doesn’t it do well, or doesn’t do at all?
What features enable the functionality that you appreciate, or seem to be missing for the functionality that
you miss? How does the system compare to other means of organizing information, such as a library
catalog, a research database, or a faceted online browsing system like Hearst, et al’s, Flamenco?
On a more general level, you might ponder what is possible with an aggregation of individual descriptive
decisions, as opposed to a set of group decisions. You might also think about what kinds of infrastructure
would be necessary to support a shared vision, such as that agreed upon by a community of practice, as
opposed to aggregation of individual visions.
Be prepared to describe your findings, and questions that they might inspire, for the rest of the class.
Step three: make it better. Or describe why it’s already perfection.
Time: 20 minutes.
Imagine you have direct control over the document set (or sets) that you considered. Thinking only of
organizational nirvana, not of money, time, effort, or technical or human limitations, would you change the
description/organization of your documents in any way?
You could change the existing system, supplement the existing system with a new one, or with multiple
new ones, replace the existing system, or anything that you like. Your system can involve selection criteria
(that is, determining which resources should be members of the set) as well as descriptive elements.
Be prepared to describe, for the rest of the class, your new system and why it’s better than the existing one.
(Or, if you think the existing system is perfect, be prepared to explain why that’s the case.)
After you’ve decided on the ultimate organizational system, discuss its implementation potential. Is it
possible? Why or why not? What might make it possible?
Step four: Share and discuss results of this exercise.
Time: 10 minutes per group.
Each group should not only present its deliberations, conclusions, and challenges to the rest of the class but
engage us with several questions inspired by the intersection of your interpretation of the readings with
these activities.