Social software can improve our decision making ability
Dave Snowden talks about how we make sense through pattern matching rather than linear analysis. Social software can support this process by improving our peripheral vision and helping us organise our own eco-system of links, cues and sources to improve our sense making and decision making ability. My own presentation, linked from the piece, describes how we can go about achieving this.
I haven’t read it yet, will do asap. Just wanted to say that that’s one of the directions I think are most promising for social software. However, I wonder how organizing information this way can stand the test of time. Our conceptual models are fluid, change over time, so I wonder how social software can help us retrieve information after some time has passed since we have created the content, tagged the links, organised the pictures. I’ll get back to this after I’ve read the paper.
Sure, the focus is on decision-making, which can happen on the basis of ephemeral information. But decisions, in particular business decisions, are made also on the basis of “historical” facts that you want to go back to at times when you have forgotten the drive, the spirit and the time-bound circumstances that shaped the information being produced at that time (e.g. documentation of a project run two years ago). Can organization of information with some value for preservation stand the test of time if it was based on a conceptual model that does no longer apply? This is a genuine question, not a polemic argument under disguise. Is it just too early to ask it?