We spend a lot of time at Synop thinking about information and what happens to it. Richard and Nathan last year came up with a fairly sophisticated but elegantly simple model of the lifecycle of content. This grew out of our experiences in trying to model workflow and activities over content in the context of Sytadel, our CMS product.
... I've been writing some explanations for the different activities that are involved with information, and thought they might be of wider interest.
We bucket the activities into 5 distinct areas, each of which may be supported (or not) by an information tool.
Peter Bailey is looking at information activities from the user-centric point of view, instead of the typical "system centric" point of view. From this standpoint, users are consuming, creating, collating, commenting and collaborating around information.
This relates directly to the discussions around personal knowledge management as opposed to corporate KM. With PKM, it is the individual working on these activities. But you can see obvious interactions with the wider organization at the collaboration and commenting points of the snowflake. And given that each person is different, everyone's personal information snowflake will look different, depending on how much emphasis they place on each of these activities.
Put those snowflakes together, and you get a nice, big snowball.
Peter Bailey's snowflake. See the article for the full discussion.
