Nov 5: The Discipline of Organizing

Organizing is how we make sense of the world. Every individual and business organizes things and information, and that organization affects how productive we are in our personal and professional lives. Many disciplines have studied organization, defining diverse concepts and methodologies without recognizing how much they have in common, including publishing and content management, business, computer science, information systems design, and library science.

A book titled The Discipline of Organizing unifies these diverse perspectives with the concept of an organizing system, defined as an intentionally arranged collection of resources and interactions. Every organizing system involves a choice of properties used to describe and arrange its resources, and those choices determine the principles of organization and the repertoire of interactions with and between the resources. In some domains the properties and principles can be chosen by people, while in others they must be discovered or imposed computationally. Nevertheless, the goals are often the same: to create categories, to combine categories, to assign or predict membership in categories, or to recommend resources to someone based on the categories to which a person or resource belongs. We can identify common life cycle patterns of organizing systems, and demonstrate that similar organizing problems can be addressed by similar solutions.

The idea that abstract concepts and methods of organizing define a new discipline that is contextualized by more specific concepts and methods in the contributing disciplines inevitably led to a collaboratively-authored book whose design embodies this intellectual architecture. The book’s transdisciplinary core is extended by discipline-specific content, creating a “family of books" from which any configuration of content can be published. The same mechanisms are being adapted to enable “reading time” personalization of ebooks by readers as they choose to include or content from one discipline or another.

The Discipline of Organizing was chosen as an "information science book of the year" in 2014, and is being used as a primary or supplemental text for more than 60 courses in Information Organization, Knowledge Management, Digital Collections, Information Architecture, Information Systems Design, and other related fields in more than 20 countries.

Date: 11/5

Time: 2pm

Location: INFO Garage

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Robert J. Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the School of Information. Before coming to Berkeley in 2002, he spent a decade in Silicon Valley, where he founded or co-founded four companies in the areas of electronic publishing and e-business. He previously worked in corporate R&D and consulting, mostly at Bell Laboratories. He has a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of California, San Diego, an MS in Software Engineering from the Wang Institute, and a BA in experimental psychology from Stanford.